Sam Jarman

Despite lacking brains or nervous systems, slime molds are capable of making surprisingly sophisticated decisions: navigating mazes, finding food and even remembering where they found it last time. How they manage to do all ...

Colloidal photonic glasses offer an appealing way to produce vivid colors without any chemical dyes—but so far, a stubborn optical effect has long prevented them from generating a true red color. Now, Yuwon Jeon and colleagues ...

For millions of people, chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are now a key feature of everyday life. These AI systems are growing at a rapid pace, but scaling them up is becoming increasingly costly and resource-intensive.

By definition, elementary particles can't be broken into smaller pieces. But in a new theoretical study published in Physical Review Letters, Johannes Skaar and colleagues have revealed what would happen if you tried anyway ...

Nonlinear interactions between light and matter are at the heart of some of the most powerful tools in modern optics, but pushing these processes to their limits has long been hampered by a fundamental constraint: the stronger ...

By stacking transistors on top of one another, rather than laying them side by side on a flat chip, many electronic engineers are hopeful that vast amounts of computing power could be packed into tiny spaces, all while cutting ...

Researchers in Spain have discovered that in collectives of moving fire ants, rippling "waves" of density and activity are likely triggered by local regions where ants collectively travel in the same direction as their neighbors.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation from the sun's surface, which can wreak havoc on Earth's power grids, damage orbiting satellites, and pose serious radiation risks to astronauts. Yet despite decades of study, ...

Researchers have created a new theoretical framework that shows how memory-preserving "memtransistors" could overcome the intrinsic limits in efficiency faced by conventional semiconductor transistors, imposed by the laws ...

For two decades, physicists have predicted the existence of a remarkable family of exotic molecules: giant atoms bound to ordinary atoms, with an electron so distant from its nucleus that it sculpts the pair into bizarre ...

A team of U.S. astronomers has observed a binary pair of white dwarfs where one star is actively devouring material from the other. Led by Emma Chickles at MIT, the researchers revealed one of the clearest views yet of how ...

Within a crystal's atomic structure, tiny atomic-scale flaws will naturally occur where electrons can become trapped. These defects have emerged as one of the leading platforms for quantum information processing. Through ...

While neutrinos are some of the most abundant particles in the universe, they remain among the least understood. One of the biggest puzzles is their mass: although experiments have shown that neutrinos must have some mass, ...

Cosmologists have long struggled to determine whether the universe's accelerating expansion is being driven by a simple cosmological constant, or whether dark energy's influence is evolving over time. In a new analysis published ...

Despite being so elusive, neutrinos are produced in abundance in some of the most violent events in the universe. One of their strangest properties is that they can spontaneously switch between three types, or "flavors": ...