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Each year, landmines kill residents of war-torn countries. This innovative tool could save lives

As he grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, Mateo Dulce Rubio would hear a familiar news story every few days—someone had stepped on another landmine. The explosion had killed or injured them. Though the capital city was far from ...

Business

Green subsidies may have hidden costs, experts warn

Government subsidies for business practices and processes should be approached with caution, even when they seem to be environmentally friendly, writes a group of scientists and economists in this week's Policy Forum in the ...

Automotive

Balancing cost and reliability in autonomous machine design

With millions of self-driving cars projected to be on the road in 2025 and autonomous drones generating billions in annual sales, safety and reliability are important considerations for consumers, manufacturers, and regulators. ...

Machine learning & AI

Google's search engine's latest AI injection will answer voiced questions about video and photos

Google is injecting its search engine with more artificial intelligence that will enable people to voice questions about images and occasionally organize an entire page of results, despite the technology's past misadventures ...

Business

Google is working on reasoning AI, chasing OpenAI's efforts

Google is working on artificial intelligence software that resembles the human ability to reason, similar to OpenAI's o1, marking a new front in the rivalry between the tech giant and the fast-growing startup.

Computer Sciences

How AI is improving simulations with smarter sampling techniques

Imagine you're tasked with sending a team of football players onto a field to assess the condition of the grass (a likely task for them, of course). If you pick their positions randomly, they might cluster together in some ...

Engineering

Squid-inspired fabric allows for temperature-controlled clothing

Too warm with a jacket on but too cold without it? Athletic apparel brands boast temperature-controlling fabrics that adapt to every climate with lightweight but warm products. Yet, consider a fabric that you can adjust to ...

Security

Using the brain as a model inspires a more robust AI

Most artificially intelligent systems are based on neural networks, algorithms inspired by biological neurons found in the brain. These networks can consist of multiple layers, with inputs coming in one side and outputs going ...

Energy & Green Tech

Making hydrogen from waste plastic could pay for itself

Hydrogen is viewed as a promising alternative to fossil fuel, but the methods used to make it either generate too much carbon dioxide or are too expensive. Rice University researchers have found a way to harvest hydrogen ...

Machine learning & AI

AI may outperform most humans at creative thinking task

Large language model (LLM) AI chatbots may be able to outperform the average human at a creative thinking task where the participant devises alternative uses for everyday objects (an example of divergent thinking), suggests ...

Hi Tech & Innovation

AI-driven tool makes it easy to personalize 3D-printable models

As 3D printers have become cheaper and more widely accessible, novice makers within a rapidly growing community are fabricating their own objects. To do this, many of these amateur artisans access free, open-source repositories ...

Machine learning & AI

Verbal nonsense reveals limitations of AI chatbots

The era of artificial-intelligence chatbots that seem to understand and use language the way we humans do has begun. Under the hood, these chatbots use large language models, a particular kind of neural network. But a new ...

Energy & Green Tech

Reduced nitrogen oxide emissions from industrial vehicles ahead

Just a couple decades ago, nitrogen oxide emissions routinely plagued cities' skies and their residents' lungs. These polluting reactive nitrogen oxide gases from the tailpipes of combustion-engine vehicles and machinery ...

Robotics

Battery-free robots use origami to change shape in mid-air

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed small robotic devices that can change how they move through the air by "snapping" into a folded position during their descent. The team published these results in ...

Engineering

Engineers create artificial cilia at the microscale

A small team of engineers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, working with a colleague from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, has found a way to create tiny artificial cilia ...

Energy & Green Tech

Study finds heat pumps more efficient than gas or oil

As the year 2030 approaches, governments and industry leaders are actively studying ways to meet a European climate law aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55%. The European Green Deal initiative has set ...