Scientists at Michigan State University have discovered how to use ultrafast lasers to wiggle atoms in exotic materials, temporarily altering their electronic behavior. By combining cutting-edge microscopes with quantum simulations, they created a nanoscale switch that could revolutionize smartphones, laptops, and even future quantum computers.
Young adult “night owls” (or “evening types”—those who prefer to stay up late) are significantly more at risk of developing problematic relationships with smartphones and social media, according to a new study.
Problematic smartphone use is characterized by anxiety when separated from one’s phone, neglecting responsibilities in favor of phone use, and compulsively checking notifications. Social media addiction is similarly marked by excessive, uncontrolled usage that interferes with daily life.
Nearly 40% of U.K. students are now believed to exhibit signs of social media addiction, with young women at particularly high risk. Past research has linked eveningness to a range of adverse outcomes, including poor sleep quality, depression, and addictive behaviors. But until now, no study has investigated the mechanisms underlying the link between being an evening person and problematic technology use.
A UK startup has made a revolutionary advancement after delivering the world’s first full-stack quantum computer, built using the same silicon chip technology found in smartphones and laptops.
London-based Quantum Motion, a quantum computing startup that develops scalable quantum computing tech using silicon, launched the industry’s first full-stack quantum computer made with silicon. It was deployed at the UK National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).
Plasma, ionized gas and the fourth state of matter, makes up over 99% of the ordinary matter in the universe. Understanding its properties is critical for developing fusion energy sources, modeling astrophysical objects like stars and improving manufacturing techniques for semiconductors in modern cell phones.
But watching and determining what happens inside high-density plasmas is difficult. Events can unfold in trillionths of a second and behave in complex, unpredictable ways.
In a study published in Optica, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) developed a new diagnostic that captures plasma evolution in time and space with a single laser shot. This breakthrough creates plasma movies with 100 billion frames per second, illuminating ultrafast dynamics that were previously impossible to observe.
A massive Android ad fraud operation dubbed “SlopAds” was disrupted after 224 malicious applications on Google Play were used to generate 2.3 billion ad requests per day.
The ad fraud campaign was discovered by HUMAN’s Satori Threat Intelligence team, which reported that the apps were downloaded over 38 million times and employed obfuscation and steganography to conceal the malicious behavior from Google and security tools.
The campaign was worldwide, with users installing the apps from 228 countries and territories, and SlopAds traffic accounting for 2.3 billion bid requests every day. The highest concentration of ad impressions originated from the United States (30%), followed by India (10%) and Brazil (7%).
Thanks to some longstanding relationships with senior executives in the prepaid and gift card industry has provided us with some unprecedented opportunities.
Our engineers are hard at work building more AI tools and utilities into the user interface and our administrative management dashboard as well.
It won’t be more than a few weeks before our first distributor is interconnected and starting to sell My Instant AI e-PIN codes.
There are many different ways to sell this product. Some will be selling it in their online stores, using their own sales and payment engines, while pulling PINs from our API in real-time as they are sold.
Others will have carded product that has a value applied to it and then activated at the checkout in a retail environment.
Some mobile phone and wireless network providers are including a card in the box, and preloading a shortcut to our platform as an app on the phone’s home screen.
Elon Musk has revealed Tesla’s new AI chips, AI5 and AI6, which will drive the company’s shift towards AI-powered services, enabling significant advancements in Full Self-Driving capabilities and potentially revolutionizing the self-driving car industry and beyond.
## Questions to inspire discussion.
Tesla’s AI Chip Advancements.
🚀 Q: What are the key features of Tesla’s AI5 and AI6 chips? A: Tesla’s AI5 and AI6 chips are inference-first, designed for high-throughput and efficient processing of AI models on devices like autos, Optimus, and Grok voice agents, being 40x faster than previous models.
💻 Q: How do Tesla’s AI5 and AI6 chips compare to previous models? A: Tesla’s AI5 chip is a 40x improvement over AI4, with 500 TOPS expanding to 5,000 TOPS, enabling excellent performance in full self-driving and Optimus humanoid robots.
🧠 Q: What is the significance of softmax in Tesla’s AI5 chip? A: AI5 is designed to run softmax natively in a few steps, unlike AI4 which relies on CPU and runs softmax in 40 steps in emulation mode.
New research from the University of St Andrews is advancing holographic technology, with potential applications in smart devices, communication, gaming, and entertainment. In a paper published in the journal Light, Science and Application, physicists from the School of Physics and Astronomy reported the creation of a new optoelectronic device that combines Holographic Metasurfaces (HMs) with Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLEDs).
Until now, holograms have typically been generated using lasers. The St Andrews team, however, demonstrated that pairing OLEDs with HMs provides a more compact and straightforward method. This approach is not only easier to implement but also less expensive, addressing one of the key challenges that has limited wider use of holographic technology.
OLEDs are thin-film devices already common in mobile phone displays and some televisions, where they create colored pixels. Because they are flat and emit light across their surface, OLEDs are also promising for emerging fields such as optical wireless communication, biophotonics, and sensing. Their versatility and ability to integrate with other components make them well-suited for developing miniaturized, light-based systems.
Picture the smartphone in your pocket, the data centers powering artificial intelligence, or the wearable health monitors that track your heartbeat. All of them rely on energy-hungry memory chips to store and process information. As demand for computing resources continues to soar, so does the need for memory devices that are smaller, faster, and far more efficient.
A new study by Auburn physicists has taken an important step toward meeting this challenge.
The study, “Electrode-Assisted Switching in Memristors Based on Single-Crystal Transition Metal Dichalcogenides,” published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, shows how memristors—ultra-thin memory devices that “remember” past electrical signals —switch their state with the help of electrodes and subtle atomic changes inside the material.