entangled dot cloud
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
No more NYT cooperation: my dog-rape red line
Over the years, I’ve written two op-eds for The New York Times about quantum computing, at the NYT editors’ invitation:Quantum Computing Promises New Insights, Not Supermachines (2011)Why Google’s Quantum Supremacy Milestone Matters (2019)I’ve also visited the NYT office and helped NYT reporters with numerous stories about quantum computing and beyond. In the wake of Cade Metz’s hatchet job against the rationalist community, I resolved no longer to talk to Metz, bu
Long-term editing of brain circuits using an engineered electrical synapse
<p>Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10501-y">doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10501-y</a></p>Connexin proteins found in white perch fish were used to engineer synthetic electrical synapses, enabling precision circuit editing in mammals.
Mesoscale atomic engineering in a crystal lattice
<p>Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10431-9">doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10431-9</a></p>Electron-beam control enables deterministic placement of tens of thousands of atomic defects in three-dimensional crystals, creating stable, programmable artificial matter for scalable quantum and nanoscale technologies.
Gaussian boson sampling with 1,024 squeezed states in 8,176 modes
<p>Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10523-6">doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10523-6</a></p>A programmable photonic quantum processor, Jiuzhang 4.0, incorporates 1,024 high-efficiency squeezed states into a hybrid spatial–temporal encoded 8,176-mode circuit.
White matter micro- and macrostructure brain charts for the human lifespan
<p>Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10454-2">doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10454-2</a></p>Integration of data representing 35,120 brain scans from diverse global studies enables construction of reference charts that define normative microstructural and macrostructural properties across the human lifespan for research and clinical diagnosis.
Targeted electron beam creates thousands of atomic crystal defects
<p>Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01328-8">doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01328-8</a></p>An electron-beam technique that can precisely create thousands of atomic defects in a crystal could be used to build quantum devices.
Growth charts reveal how the brain’s ‘communication highways’ change throughout life
<p>Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01318-w">doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01318-w</a></p>Studies of white matter — the tissue used for communication between brain regions — have revealed substantial changes in people with neurological diseases and disorders. The creation of white-matter brain charts enables individual deviations from the typical structure to be assessed using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans.
Sustaining microglial reparative function enhances stroke recovery
<p>Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10480-0">doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10480-0</a></p>Reparative microglia persist in the brain after stroke but become dysfunctional through ZFP384-mediated mechanisms; however, this process can be mitigated by targeting Zfp384 using therapeutic antisense oligonucleotides.
Show HN: SLayer, a semantic layer maintained by your agent
Hello HN!If you want to connect your agent to a database (say, to build a data analyst chatbot or any kind of agentic app) today you have 2 options: an SQL MCP server or a semantic layer.SQL MCP is the easiest path to setup, especially if you also have a .md knowledge base which the agent can update. It gets quite messy quickly though, especially if there's many interactions or DB is large. Generated SQL is hard to review if you want to understand where the numbers came from, and related qu
Show HN: NodeDB – High Perfomance Multi-Model Database
Hey HN,I've been working on a multi-model database called NodeDB.Originally, i've found out the idea of SurrealDB quite good. However, it doesn't have some graph and vector features that I need. And since it is just a KV wrapper, instead of purpose-built engine, the performance will never be close to the specialized databases (like Neo4j, Pinecone, Clickhouse, etc).And i've asked myself, what if, there is a database that have the same idea, but built differently? Instead of j
Can you help reconcile my first/second-hand LLM Experience with HN's Experience?
I've made an account as a long-time lurker because I am hoping y'all could help reconcile my experience in my company/team with what seems to be the wise HN consensus around LLMs.My Background (Software Engineer II):I've been writing software professionally for >10 years and grew up coding games/websites for fun; did my undergraduate in C.S./C.E., and did some time in ML research and such. Right now I'm on the back-end/DevOps team - my teammates are all
The social contract between the user and the OS is broken
Here are just some of the social contract rules that have been reneged upon:* Hitting the X means close/quit the app.* Close/quit means end the task/program, not minimize it and run in the background.* Searching allows you to search for a file or a program quickly and directly.* No ads on an OS that the user paid for* Clicking "No" means stop asking, not "remind me later"* User's data should remain user's data* If a user backs up files to the cloud, i
Show HN: GIF Pile. a site to make piles of GIFs
I'm quite fond of obnoxious looking gifs in a post-ironic way as a manner of shitposting and or injecting humor into a chat. The issue with this however is that, for no real good reason at all, the simple usecase of "Have image/gif background, bombard with garbage" had no real good tooling.There's gif editors out there, EZgif my beloved is probably my most used non-search-indexing-slash-social-media-site, but they're kinda clunky for my specific usecase of making di
Ask HN: Is Spam getting worse or is Gmail getting worse?
Over the past couple of months I've noticed that number of spam emails landing in my inbox has increased by quite a bit. I keep a very tidy inbox, so it's pretty easy for me to notice them and mark them as spam. But I'm curious: is Google just getting worse at detecting spam, or is the spam somehow evolving?For example, I just got this email:Sender: [email protected]
Subject: the wagon is inThe body contains tons of literal HTML tags that weren't parsed
Show HN: Recursant, a mesh-based control plane for AI agents
I have submitted before, but it didn’t end up in the Show HN list for some reason.I have built Recursant, an AI agent governance platform that governs agents across stacks and clouds to maintain compliance. In many large enterprises this is a real compliance issue with different teams using different frameworks and runtime environments, which creates control risk.I hope to get some feedback on it. It is a viable alternative to the large vendor controlled stacks. Architecturally it is quite uniqu
Show HN: I made a screen recording app to make demos like an Apple commercial
Hey HN!I made ShotGlass, a Mac app for screenshots, screen recordings, and cinematic demos.I was tired of jumping between four apps to make one product demo. Screenshots, recordings, annotations, and After Effects for anything cinematic.I also saw the MacBook Neo commercials (recording playing on a 3D MacBook in a scene) and wondered why no screen recorder just did that.So ShotGlass does all of it: multi-window capture, annotations, zooms, transitions, and dropping a recording onto a 3D MacBook
Identity traits sharply narrow who becomes friends or marries, model reveals
Our personal identity is composed of many dimensions, such as age, gender, ethnic background, or socioeconomic status. A research team led by Fariba Karimi from the Institute of Human-Centered Computing at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) and Samuel Martin-Gutierrez from the Complexity Science Hub developed the statistical computational model "MAPS" to calculate the influence of these factors on our social relationships.
3D atomic rearrangement creates 40,000 quantum defects in 40 minutes
It's been 37 years since scientists first demonstrated the ability to move single atoms, suggesting the possibility of designing materials atom by atom to customize their properties. Today there are several techniques that allow researchers to move individual atoms in order to give materials exotic quantum properties and improve our understanding of quantum behavior.
Researchers “reprogram” materials by quickly rearranging their atoms
It’s been 37 years since scientists first demonstrated the ability to move single atoms, suggesting the possibility of designing materials atom by atom to customize their properties. Today there are several techniques that allow researchers to move individual atoms in order to give materials exotic quantum properties and improve our understanding of quantum behavior.But existing techniques can only move atoms across the surface of materials in two dimensions. Most also require painstakingly