In a major leap for artificial intelligence (AI) and photonics, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have created optical generative models capable of producing novel images using the physics of light instead of conventional electronic computation.
Published in Nature, the work presents a new paradigm for generative AI that could dramatically reduce energy use while enabling scalable, high-performance content creation.
Generative models, including diffusion models and large language models, form the backbone of today’s AI revolution. These systems can create realistic images, videos, and human-like text, but their rapid growth comes at a steep cost: escalating power demands, large carbon footprints, and increasingly complex hardware requirements. Running such models requires massive computational infrastructure, raising concerns about their long-term sustainability.
A research team has developed a novel direct sampling method based on deep generative models. Their method enables efficient sampling of the Boltzmann distribution across a continuous temperature range. The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters. The team was led by Prof. Pan Ding, Associate Professor from the Departments of Physics and Chemistry, and Dr. Li Shuo-Hui, Research Assistant Professor from the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
A giant bubble of gas and dust surrounds the red supergiant DFK 52, likely created in a powerful outburst 4,000 years ago. Astronomers are baffled at how the star survived without going supernova, and suspect a hidden companion may have played a role. This discovery could reveal clues about the final stages of massive stars.
Astronomers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a vast and expanding bubble of gas and dust surrounding a red supergiant star – the largest structure of its kind ever seen in the Milky Way. The bubble, which contains as much mass as the Sun, was blown out in a mysterious stellar eruption around 4,000 years ago. Why the star survived such a powerful event is a puzzle, the scientists say.
The new results are published in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the team was led by Mark Siebert, Chalmers, Sweden. Using the ALMA radio telescope in Chile, the researchers observed the star DFK 52 – a red supergiant similar to the well-known star Betelgeuse.
SpaceX’s successful Starship IFT-10 test and advancements in Starlink technology are poised to significantly reduce launch costs and disrupt the broadband landscape, paving the way for a more efficient and cost-effective space travel and satellite internet service.
## Questions to inspire discussion.
Starship and Starlink Advancements.
🚀 Q: How does Starship improve Starlink satellite deployment? A: Starship enables deployment of V3 Starlink satellites that are 40-50X cheaper per unit bandwidth compared to Falcon 9, according to Mach33 research.
📡 Q: What advantages do larger satellites on Starship offer? A: Starship’s size allows for larger satellites delivering more bandwidth per mass, improving physics scaling laws and making it 50X more efficient than Falcon 9 for launching bandwidth per kilogram.
Cost and Capacity Improvements.
In their quest to explore and characterize high-temperature superconductors, physicists have mostly focused on a material that is not the absolute highest. That’s because that crystal is much easier to split into uniform, easily measurable samples. But in 2024, researchers found a way to grow good crystals that are very similar to the highest temperature superconductor.
Now, many from the same group have analyzed these new crystals and determined why the highest temperature superconductor is indeed higher and what details were missed by looking at the more popular crystal. Their work is published in Physical Review Letters.
The cuprate Bi2223, which at ambient pressure (about 100,000 pascals) superconducts at 110 Kelvin (−163°C), has proven easier to study and specify, even though the similar cuprate Hg1223 superconducts at 134 K.
An international team of researchers has announced a significant advancement in gravitational-wave astronomy, with the detection of 128 new cosmic collisions involving black holes and neutron stars.
This discovery more than doubles the number of known gravitational-wave events and marks a major milestone in our understanding of the universe.
The findings come from the latest data release by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Virgo Gravitational Wave Interferometer (Virgo) Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) collaboration, a global network of gravitational-wave observatories.
A giant anomalous Hall effect (AHE) has been observed in a nonmagnetic material for the first time, as reported by researchers from Japan. This surprising result was achieved using high-quality Cd3As2 thin films, a Dirac semimetal, under an in-plane magnetic field. By modulating the material’s band structure, the team isolated the AHE and traced its origin to orbital magnetization rather than spin, challenging long-held assumptions in condensed matter physics.
In 1879, American physicist Edwin Hall discovered that a voltage develops across a conductor when it carries an electric current in a magnetic field, caused by the sideways deflection of moving charges. This phenomenon, which later became known as the Hall effect, quickly became a hot topic in the field and led to notable advances in the theoretical, experimental, and practical realms alike. Soon after the initial discovery of the Hall effect, scientists noticed that magnetic materials exhibited a similar phenomenon—this was coined the anomalous Hall effect (AHE).
Much more puzzling than the ordinary Hall effect, the AHE has stirred up debate among physicists for decades regarding the true nature of its origin. Some theoretical predictions have even hinted that AHE may be possible even in nonmagnetic materials. However, experimental confirmation of these predictions had never been achieved—until now.
