Tech Xplore news

The rules of tag are simple enough for a playground: catch or be caught. But when the players are autonomous drones, the game becomes a test of machine learning, split-second decision-making and cooperative strategy.

From searching disaster zones and responding to chemical spills to monitoring fragile ecosystems, future robot swarms may have to act in places where direct human control is difficult or dangerous. To operate autonomously, ...

The scales of a pine cone open in low humidity to scatter seeds but close in damp conditions to protect seeds from moisture. An artificial material with the same behavior could be useful in applications like moisture-responsive ...

For investors trying to make sense of a company going public, one of the most important documents is often the most difficult to understand. Initial public offering (IPO) filings are dense disclosures submitted to the U.S. ...

On a sunny summer's day, children build sandcastles on the beach. But behind every castle and crumbling dune lies a surprisingly difficult scientific problem. In fact, the physics of sand is not yet fully understood—which ...

MIT researchers have engineered bacteria that can function as transistors, allowing the team to create living "circuit boards" that can be printed onto a growth medium in a Petri dish.

A new security loophole discovered by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst can bring some expired credit cards back to life. If stolen, these "zombie credit cards" could leave cardholders vulnerable to ...

Researchers in the Riccio College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated that redesigning both hardware and algorithms can make AI applications on edge devices more efficient. As proof ...

A team of researchers from Adelaide University's School of Chemical Engineering has identified a new way to create an important chemical for energy storage using urea. Hydrazine, the chemical in question, is widely used in ...

A few months ago, AI made headlines for cracking a mathematical puzzle that had stumped experts for decades. Mathematician Paul Erdős posed the unit-distance conjecture, predicting how many pairs of points could lie the same ...

When air is blown across the neck of a bottle, it doesn't just produce a pleasant tone: it also demonstrates a phenomenon called Helmholtz resonance. This occurs when airflow passing across an opening causes air trapped inside ...

Among the many predictions about the future of artificial intelligence is that models will one day be able to conduct scientific research on their own, leaving humans out of the equation. Already, they can write code, run ...