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MIT engineers develop a magnetic transistor for more energy-efficient electronics

Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly

Robots With Different Designs Can Now Share Skills

Abilities taught to one robot don’t usually work on another. With a new approach, it’s one and done. As robots move into the real world, they’ll need to become more adaptable. But right now, it’s hard to transfer skills from one machine to another. A new system makes this possible.One of the most popular ways to teach robots is to have a human show them what to do—either by physically guiding the robot’s joints, using remote control, or even drawing the desired motion.But those skill

Ask HN: Rant, Am I bad or is this a company with a poor tech culture?

Hey all, can you sanity check me? Am I a bad developer (always a possibility), or do I focus too much on unimportant things?I've got 13+ YoE and been working in big tech for about 4 years, joined an established start up (10 years old, profitable) a month ago, and wondering if I am out of touch after the meat-grinder that is competing for delivering "impact", stack ranking and so on.I don't know if I should stay at this company as I feel like I can't really do good work h

AI tackles one of math's most brutal problems: Inverse PDEs

Penn Engineers have developed a new way to use AI to solve inverse partial differential equations (PDEs), a particularly challenging class of mathematical problems with broad implications for understanding the natural world.

Physicists achieve first-ever 'quadsqueezing' quantum interaction

Researchers at the University of Oxford have demonstrated a new type of quantum interaction using a single trapped ion. By creating and controlling increasingly complex forms of "squeezing" – including a fourth-order effect known as quadsqueezing – the team has, for the first time, made previously unreachable quantum effects experimentally accessible.

Physicists have measured 'negative time' in the lab

As Homer tells us, Odysseus made an epic journey, against the odds, from Troy to his home in Ithaca. He visited many lands, but mostly dwelt with the nymph Calypso on her island. We can imagine that his wife, Penelope, would have asked him about that particular time. Odysseus might have replied, "It was nothing. In fact, it was less than nothing. Negative five years I dwelt with Calypso. How else could I have arrived home after only ten years? If you don't believe me, ask her."

Oxford physicists achieve first-ever “quadsqueezing” breakthrough in quantum physics

Scientists have created a powerful new way to control quantum systems, achieving the first-ever demonstration of quadsqueezing—an elusive fourth-order quantum effect. By combining simple forces in a clever way, they made previously hidden quantum behaviors visible and usable, opening new frontiers for quantum technology.

This new aluminum could replace rare metals and cut costs dramatically

A team at King’s College London has created a powerful new aluminum compound capable of doing the work of expensive rare metals. Its unique triangular structure gives it remarkable stability and reactivity, allowing it to drive chemical reactions in ways never seen before. The discovery could lead to greener and far more affordable industrial processes. It may even enable the creation of entirely new materials.

Physicists have measured ‘negative time’ in the lab

David Clode / UnsplashAs Homer tells us, Odysseus made an epic journey, against the odds, from Troy to his home in Ithaca. He visited many lands, but mostly dwelt with the nymph Calypso on her island. We can imagine that his wife, Penelope, would have asked him about that particular time. Odysseus might have replied, “It was nothing. In fact, it was less than nothing. Negative five years I dwelt with Calypso. How else could I have arrived home after only ten years? If you don’t believe me, ask

Improving understanding with language

When she was a child, MIT senior Olivia Honeycutt would spend summers on her grandparents’ farm in rural Alabama outside Birmingham. The practical and cultural differences between farm and city life became more pronounced by comparison. “Life and the way we lived it slowed down on the farm,” she says. “It was a nice change of pace.” These days, Honeycutt, a double major in computation and cognition and linguistics, still finds herself moving between several worlds that are simulta

Beacon Biosignals is mapping the brain during sleep

The human brain remains one of the most fascinating and perplexing mysteries in medicine. Scientists still struggle to match neurological activity with brain function and detect problems early, slowing efforts to treat neurological disorders and other diseases.Beacon Biosignals is working to make sense of the brain by monitoring its activity while people sleep. The company, which was founded by Jake Donoghue PhD ’19 and former MIT researcher Jarrett Revels, developed a lightweight headband that

How Does Imagination Really Work in the Brain? New Theory Upends What We Knew

Imagination may have more to do with the brain activity it silences than the activity it creates. Your brain is currently expending about a fifth of your body’s energy, and almost none of that is being used for what you’re doing right now. Reading these words, feeling the weight of your body in a chair—all of this together barely changes the rate at which your brain consumes energy, perhaps by as little as 1 percent.The other 99 percent is used on the activity the brain generates on its own: neu

A Quieter World for Quantum: Argonne Demonstrates Ultra-Low Noise Levels of an Innovative Qubit Platform

A novel qubit platform invented at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory exhibits noise levels ...

Quantum computing's next dark horse emerges from a frozen surface, where almost nothing behaves as expected

Quantum bits (qubits) are the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. A novel qubit platform invented ...

A longstanding quantum roadblock just fell, opening existing fiber networks to ultra-secure light signals

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have broken a longstanding barrier by managing to send single photons—that can't be copied or split and thus are secure—in the network of optical fibers we already have. This opens up a broad range of applications relying on secure quantum information. The research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Unlocking mysteries of the universe through math

GPS navigation, cryptography, quantum computing — while some of humankind’s greatest advancements have been invented by pioneers from various cultures, they were founded upon one common grammar: mathematics.“Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe,” said the famous Italian astronomer, physicist, and philosopher Galileo Galilei, who, among his various scientific contributions, helped provide evidence for the idea that the sun is at the center of the solar system.Although mos

Sudden quantum jolts may not break adiabatic behavior after all

In thermodynamics, an "adiabatic process" is a system change that transfers no heat in or out of the system. Any and all energy change in that system are therefore accomplished by doing work on the system, work being action that moves matter over a distance. (An example is a bicycle tire pump or lifting a box from the floor.)

The hidden structure behind a widely used class of materials

Materials called relaxor ferroelectrics have been used for decades in technologies like ultrasounds, microphones, and sonar systems. Their unique properties come from their atomic structure, but that structure has stubbornly eluded direct measurement.Now a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has directly characterized the three-dimensional atomic structure of a relaxor ferroelectric for the first time. The findings, reported today in Science, provide a framework for refining models used t

Quantum computing's next dark horse emerges from a frozen surface, where almost nothing behaves as expected

Quantum bits (qubits) are the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. A novel qubit platform invented at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory exhibits noise levels thousands of times lower than those of most traditional qubits. "Noise" refers to disturbances in the environment that diminish a qubit's performance. The platform was built by trapping single electrons on the surface of frozen neon gas. The recent finding positions Argonne's platfor

How neurons sense bacteria in the gut

Recent studies suggest animals and people alike have close and complex relationships with the bacteria around and within them. The human gut microbiome, for instance, has been associated with both depression and Parkinson’s disease. To go beyond association toward understanding of the actual mechanisms that enable the bacterial microbiome to influence brain function, a new study by neuroscientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT examines the mechanisms at work in a model