Tech Xplore news

Tech Xplore / A new way to test how well AI systems classify text

Is this movie review a rave or a pan? Is this news story about business or technology? Is this online chatbot conversation veering off into giving financial advice? Is this online medical information site giving out misinformation?

Aug 14, 2025 in Software
Tech Xplore / Going places: Muscle-inspired mechanism powers tiny autonomous insect robots

Science frequently draws inspiration from the natural world. After all, nature has had billions of years to perfect its systems and processes. Taking their cue from mollusk catch muscles, researchers have developed a low-voltage, ...

Aug 13, 2025 in Robotics
Tech Xplore / Robots learn human-like movement adjustments to prevent object slipping

To effectively tackle a variety of real-world tasks, robots should be able to reliably grasp objects of different shapes, textures and sizes, without dropping them in undesired locations. Conventional approaches to enhancing ...

Aug 13, 2025 in Robotics
Tech Xplore / Quasi-solid electrolyte developed for safer and greener lithium-ion batteries

3D-SLISE is a quasi-solid electrolyte developed at the Institute of Science Tokyo, which enables safe, fast-charging/discharging of 2.35 V lithium-ion batteries to be fabricated under ambient conditions. With energy-efficient ...

Aug 13, 2025 in Engineering
Tech Xplore / Q&A: Seashells inspire a better way to recycle plastic

Researchers from Georgia Tech have created a material inspired by seashells to help improve the process of recycling plastics and make the resulting material more reliable.

Aug 13, 2025 in Engineering
Tech Xplore / Scientists visualize real-time electrolyte behavior in lithium-sulfur battery cells

Using a non-destructive method, a team at HZB investigated practical lithium-sulfur pouch cells with lean electrolyte for the first time. With operando neutron tomography, they could visualize in real-time how the liquid ...

Aug 13, 2025 in Energy & Green Tech
Tech Xplore / Brain cells learn faster than machine learning, research reveals

Researchers have demonstrated that brain cells learn faster and carry out complex networking more effectively than machine learning by comparing how both a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI) system known as "DishBrain" ...

Aug 12, 2025 in Hi Tech & Innovation
Tech Xplore / Tiny robots use sound to self-organize into intelligent groups

Animals like bats, whales and insects have long used acoustic signals for communication and navigation. Now, an international team of scientists has taken a page from nature's playbook to model micro-sized robots that use ...

Aug 12, 2025 in Robotics
Tech Xplore / Black metal could give a heavy boost to solar power generation

In the quest for energy independence, researchers have studied solar thermoelectric generators (STEGs) as a promising source of solar electricity generation. Unlike the photovoltaics currently used in most solar panels, STEGs ...

Aug 12, 2025 in Engineering
Dialog / More cameras, more problems? Why deep learning still struggles with 3D human sensing

Accurately estimating human pose was among the first tasks addressed by deep learning. Early models like OpenPose focused on localizing human joints as 2D keypoints in image coordinates. Later, Google came up with Mediapipe, ...

Aug 12, 2025 in Computer Sciences
Tech Xplore / Filtered data stops openly-available AI models from performing dangerous tasks, study finds

Researchers from the University of Oxford, EleutherAI, and the UK AI Security Institute have reported a major advance in safeguarding open-weight language models. By filtering out potentially harmful knowledge during training, ...

Aug 12, 2025 in Security
Tech Xplore / Carbon-fiber smart plastic: Self-healing, shape-shifting and stronger than steel

Aerospace engineering and materials science researchers at Texas A&M University have uncovered new properties of an ultra-durable, recyclable, smart plastic—paving the way for transformative applications in the defense, ...

Aug 11, 2025 in Engineering