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Engineering

Solar-powered gel pulls drinking water from the air

Scientists in recent years have sought to efficiently draw moisture from ambient air and condense it into potable water using materials made of salt and absorbent polymers. But these materials, known as hydrogels, until now ...

Machine learning & AI

Can ChatGPT be charged in a murder? Florida wants to find out

Before he opened fire on the Florida State University campus last year, killing two people and wounding six others, Phoenix Ikner had a conversation.

Automotive

New AI tool predicts airport traffic to avert devastating collisions

In managing airport traffic, small errors can cause catastrophe. A group from the CMU Robotics Institute's AirLab used the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Bridges-2 supercomputer to create World2Rules, an AI that draws ...

Robotics

From motion to memory: Researchers create soft machines that amplify movement and remember touch

Conventional soft actuators are often limited by weak force, small displacement, and slow response. To overcome these limitations, researchers have developed a new mechanical system that can amplify motion and remember external ...

Technology news

Energy & Green Tech

Copper cold plates could slash data-center energy usage

Mechanical engineers have designed a more effective and energy-efficient technology for cooling computer chips. Published in Cell Reports Physical Science, the researchers used a mathematical algorithm and advanced 3D printing ...

Security

Your conversations with AI may not be as private as you think

A study conducted by researchers at IMDEA Networks Institute has revealed that ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Grok, and Perplexity AI use different types of trackers from Meta, Google, TikTok and other companies, potentially ...

Engineering

Cooling without pumps: New measurement data for modular reactors

Passive cooling systems for nuclear power plants operate without pumps or electricity: They rely solely on physical effects such as density differences to dissipate heat. Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have ...

Machine learning & AI

ChatGPT has a goblin problem. It's bigger than an AI quirk

Starting sometime in November, people who used ChatGPT began noticing some peculiar behavior: the AI chatbot would not shut up about goblins. So, OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot, began looking into it.

Consumer & Gadgets

Are you addicted to your AI chatbot? It might be by design

AI chatbots can grant almost any request—a celebrity in love with you, a research assistant, a book character sprung to life—instantly and with little effort. New research presented at the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors ...

Robotics

How fish muscles became blueprints for smarter underwater robots

Researchers at the Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab at Peking University have developed a bio-signal framework showing that fish muscles do far more than generate swimming motion. In a series of studies led by Xie Guangming, ...

Electronics & Semiconductors

Video: Electrical control of a metal-mediated DNA memory

DNA stores our genetic code. What if it could also be integrated with electronics to store and read other information? Scientists have been investigating how to store data in DNA, but retrieving the information remains a ...

Energy & Green Tech

Why solar research should stop leading with climate

Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. Management looked at it, decided film was doing fine, and put the technology in a drawer. By the time they took it seriously, other companies had taken the market. Kodak filed for ...