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Creating a quantum device often begins by intentionally damaging a crystal. Scientists fire an ultrafast laser pulse into a material, knocking atoms out of place and leaving behind tiny imperfections called vacancies. Far from being flaws, these vacancies can behave as qubits—the fundamental building blocks of quantum information.

In today's digital world, everything from medical images and financial records to personal photos and secure communications depends on encryption systems that can protect sensitive information. But real-world technologies rarely operate under perfect conditions. Measurements can be imprecise, hardware introduces small errors, and communication channels are often affected by noise.

A new systematic review and meta-analysis of 30 studies finds virtual reality training may improve nurses' knowledge, practical skills, self-efficacy, and critical thinking, though evidence certainty varies widely across outcomes.

Deliveroo plans Coco robot deliveries in five UK locations, starting in London. Find out where the rollout is heading and what it means for customers. The post Deliveroo Announces Coco Robot Delivery Rollout for Five UK Locations appeared first on TechRepublic.

Meta says Muse Spark helped researchers answer five open math questions through its regular chat interface, with experts guiding and checking the work. The post Meta’s AI Helped Tackle Unsolved Math Through a Regular Chat Window appeared first on TechRepublic.

In January 2013, Lake Michigan reached its lowest water level on record. Seven years later, in the summer of 2020, it broke the opposite record with widespread flooding, eroded shorelines and closed lakeside roads.

Google has closed its open source vulnerability reporting programme to new submissions while it recalibrates in the face of a surge in automated junk reports.

Kate Rooney / CNBC: Meta, Walmart, Stripe, and others publish the Personal Agent Protocol to standardize and secure interactions between AI bots and businesses  —  A month after Meta's launch of Muse, the personal agent that quickly turned into a viral sensation, a group of companies is coming together to try …

A new study shows that pre-sowing seed treatments with a benzyl isothiocyanate nanoemulsion and an essential oil-based botanical fungicide significantly reduce Salmonella enterica on Brassicaceae microgreen seeds without compromising most yields.

A joint research team led by professors Seunghyun Baik and Joonmyung Choi from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) has developed a new nanocomposite material whose electrical and thermal conductivities increase as it is stretched. The team successfully applied it to stable heat dissipation for foldable phones.

Meta and OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor’s startup Sierra are building a set of tech standards to make it easier to do business with AI bots.

A new dual-stream deep learning framework fuses spatiotemporal brain activity with dynamic functional connectivity to classify neurological disease severity from fMRI with 99.36 percent accuracy.

Meta and OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor’s startup Sierra are building a set of tech standards to make it easier to do business with AI bots.

Iran’s student robotics team has returned home after winning the team championship at the 2026 Asia-Pacific Robotics Competition in Malaysia.

Mac Mini docks add more ports and allow for further internal storage. Many of them are molded to fit directly beneath Apple's popular mini PC.

A new scoping review maps how nanoparticles and nanocarriers could overcome drug-resistant oral Candida infections, while warning that fragmented methods are holding the field back.

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled numerous stars formerly hidden by clouds of dust in a stellar nursery known as NGC 7129—a cauldron of cosmic creation, 3,300 light-years from Earth. Webb captured infrared light, which pierces through the dense matter that scatters or absorbs other types of light. This region, rife with stellar objects in different stages of their lives, offers an opportunity to explore how stars shape their surroundings.

Tesla Full Self-Driving is really good. I have used it for over 76 percent of my driving since FSD v14 launched around this time last year, equating to about 76 percent of my miles using the suite. It’s truly the only way I prefer to travel, but admittedly I save some of the more fun […] The post Tesla Full Self-Driving: five things that are keeping FSD supervised appeared first on TESLARATI.

Google today announced its new EmbeddingGemma 2 model that can be used to “organize, search, and connect information directly on consumer hardware.” To show off its potential, Google created an AI Edge Foresight Mac app for “intelligent notetaking.” more…

Google today announced its new EmbeddingGemma 2 model that can be used to “organize, search, and connect information directly on consumer hardware.” To show off its potential, Google created an AI Edge Foresight Mac app for “intelligent notetaking.” more…

Detecting impaired motor function as early as possible after birth with the help of a standard camera linked to intelligent systems can help diagnose infantile conditions characterized by hypotonia: reduced muscle tone, which can limit active movement. A research team is investigating this approach based on work carried out on babies with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a rare genetic neuromuscular disorder.

Scientists have engineered an oregano leaf oil nanoemulsion that shows dramatically enhanced antimicrobial, anticancer, and anti-inflammatory activity while sparing healthy cells.

Google Drive and Docs can now fully render markdown files for us to see visually while maintaining machine readability.

Google: Google DeepMind launches EmbeddingGemma 2, a 740M-parameter model to map code, images, video, and audio in a shared embedding space, under an Apache 2.0 license  —  EmbeddingGemma 2 is the most capable model for on-device multimodal embeddings, natively mapping combinations of text, images …

Researchers in Nanjing developed an interpretable machine learning model that analyzes MRI tumor subregions to predict prostate cancer aggressiveness noninvasively before biopsy.

I went to Galaxy Robot Park in Seoul to see how we might one day live with robots. It was part cutting-edge technology, part theatrics.

The only known supernova remnant of its kind in the Milky Way has an unexpectedly intricate structure: chains of gas knots resembling pearls on a string, each wide enough to fit the solar system multiple times. Using the Gemini North telescope, an international team co-led by Ilaria Caiazzo, assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), captured the most detailed view yet of Pa 30, revealing striking new features of the remnant associated with a historical supernova witnessed nearly 850 years ago. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Researchers have combined a laboratory wave tank, validated CFD simulations, a compact analytical formula, and a physics-informed neural network to predict the waves generated by a box-shaped plunger wavemaker with errors as low as under one percent.

Researchers have developed a physics-informed neural network with an attention mechanism that predicts electric vehicle range with far greater accuracy by embedding energy conservation laws directly into the training process.

Ghost AI workstations are selling like hot cakes and there’s a very good reason why.

A research team led by the University of Osaka has directly observed, for the first time, an unusual heavy-fermion state forming at the boundary between a one-atom-thick material and a metal. Such states are closely linked to exotic quantum phenomena, including unconventional superconductivity, and the finding opens new possibilities for designing quantum materials through their interfaces.

An open-source tool packages robot workcell failures into checksummed evidence bundles with presence-based replay checks for reproducible incident analysis.

Researchers have engineered a custom ionizable lipid nanoparticle that delivers CAR-encoding mRNA into human T cells with over 90 percent efficiency, producing potent antitumor activity in vitro without viral vectors or electroporation.

Earth seems like a troubled place right now, but at least our cosmic surroundings appear peaceful. This is not universally true, as explosions, collisions and other dangers lurk in other places and times.

When it comes to consumer protections, Europe is following its own path. That may be visible in its quixotic-seeming decisions that allegedly prevent Apple from introducing Siri AI in the European Union. It’s time to begin to grapple with what those decisions mean. I think the EU has got it wrong in how it has chosen to enforce its Digital Markets Act against Apple. The refusal to figure out a mutually satisfactory way to apply the intent of the DMA on Apple’s business practices while protecting its stated values around privacy is a failure of imagination and diplomacy. Apple and Japan previously reached an agreement that achieved positive impacts for third-party developers while protecting the product design integrity and customer privacy the company and its customers care about. Prevention is not cure That lack

A metal–organic framework nanovaccine co-delivering tumour antigens and STING agonists induced systemic tumour regression, immune memory and synergy with radiotherapy and checkpoint blockade across five cancer types in mice.

Google limits free Gemini users to Flash-Lite starting Oct. 9. Find out which models paid plans retain and what to check before upgrading your account. The post Google Limits Free Gemini to Flash-Lite: What Changes Starting Oct. 9 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Moflin leads our robot companion picks, while Loona, Mirumi, Ropet KAMOMO, and Eilik offer mobile, wearable, customizable, and budget alternatives. The post Best Robot Companions for 2026: Mirumi, Moflin, Loona, Ropet and Eilik appeared first on TechRepublic.

Minerva Humanoids has raised about $10M in pre-seed funding to build humanoid robots for dangerous jobs. The San Francisco startup works on oil and gas and public safety. General Catalyst led the round, with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures as co-leads, the company said on Tuesday. Hugging Face, Codecademy, RunwayVC and Compound are among […] This story continues at The Next Web

Six physician groups say AI is not better informed than doctors after RFK Jr.'s summit remarks. Here is how to use AI chatbots safely and with care.

Black holes, despite their extreme nature, are described by surprisingly few basic parameters: their mass, charge and spin. Two black holes may have formed for completely different reasons and passed through very different histories, yet still end up in the same final state. John Wheeler summarized this idea with the famous phrase "black holes have no hair."

Google DeepMind Chief AI Readiness Officer Lila Ibrahim may be the only person with that title, and as intelligence risks rise, she takes it very seriously.

Researchers in China have developed a structure-adaptive Belief Rule Base tuned by an improved whale optimization algorithm that automates heart disease diagnosis while keeping the model interpretable.

The Trump administration is advancing the first government-funded clinical trials of the psychedelic drug ibogaine to treat opioid addiction and PTSD

Internal instructions reviewed by TIME show the AI assistant mapping users and their contacts—including people who don’t use Muse—and sharing anonymized insights across its system.

A Chinese research team has built a radiomics and deep learning model that predicts brain invasion in meningiomas from routine preoperative MRI scans with moderate accuracy across two hospitals.

Starting on October 9th, anyone using Google Gemini on a free plan will be limited to the Flash Lite model. Free users can currently choose from Gemini Flash Lite, Flash, and Pro, but now you'll need a $4.99/month Google AI Plus subscription to access the standard Flash model. However, that subscription is also getting a downgrade - it will soon no longer include Gemini Pro. Google says AI Plus subscribers will receive an email letting them know when they'll lose access to it. After these changes, access to the top-tier Gemini Pro model and a "Deep Think" advanced reasoning option will be restricted to users with a Google AI Pro or Ultra s … Read the full story at The Verge.

Researchers combined rice and soy protein nanoparticles with starch nanocrystals to extend the lifetime of aqueous food foams from under 30 minutes to more than 12 hours.

A new pot experiment shows that iron oxide nanoparticles support maize growth and antioxidant defenses under low to moderate combined copper and polystyrene microplastic stress, but root proteomics reveals that severe co-contamination overwhelms the plant's redox machinery and depletes cytosolic and mitochondrial proteins.

Francis Halzen is a leader in the study of neutrinos, ghostly particles from across the universe that hint at exciting new physics

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day.

Researchers have built a modular AI pipeline that indexes hours of video and retrieves specific people from text, image, or face queries, achieving record mean Average Precision on the RSTPReid benchmark.

Social media is full of useful, funny, educational, and entertaining videos that people often want to save for

Reflection AI’s Beam Model Only about one in every 22 of Beam’s parameters does any work on a

Researchers in Uruguay have released complete open-source designs for a 1,110-dollar robotic gantry that combines RGB and thermal imaging to automate non-invasive plant phenotyping in growth chambers.

STOCKHOLM — Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that scientists believe offer clues to how the universe evolved. “It was a great surprise and I obviously didn’t expect it,” Halzen said, speaking to the committee by phone from Italy, in a call broadcast at the news conference to announce the winner. Halzen said it was predicted before that he would win the Nobel Prize but the announcement still made him feel “strange.” “I am working on a proposal, and I hope that this prize will help getting it approved,” he said to chuckles from the audience. Halzen paved the way for a new kind of astronomy The Nobel Committee for Physics also said Halzen’s work was instrumental to the construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. “Francis Halzen realized that the ice at the South Pole could visualize these neutrino messengers from cosmos,” committee member Eva Olsson said during the

The personal agent boom is lifting the fortunes of AMD and Intel, which have outperformed their megacap tech peers over the past month.

The personal agent boom is lifting the fortunes of AMD and Intel, which have outperformed their megacap tech peers over the past month.

The current beta of iOS 27.2 includes a Siri AI “suggested actions” feature in the Messages app that some will consider useful and others find annoying. A developer who has found a number of unannounced features has discovered that Apple is seeking to keep everyone happy with a new set of options … more…

A microfluidic nanoblade device that slices open the membranes of thousands of cells at once reveals that cells prioritize repairing the nuclear envelope over the plasma membrane after extreme mechanical damage.

Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and his discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.

Researchers in India have developed a multi-phase fusion architecture that identifies stable, consistent features across a writer's genuine signatures, achieving accuracies of up to 100 percent on multilingual benchmark datasets for offline signature verification.

The Nobel was awarded “for the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

The Nobel was awarded “for the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Lifelong Oversight for AI Medical Devices A hip implant does not rewrite itself after it leaves the factory.

One of the main new features of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 is the new Siri AI, but this still isn't available in the EU, despite the fact that Apple released iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 last month. Now if you've been wondering just how much longer you'll have to wait, we have some bad news. According to the generally reliable Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, we shouldn't expect Siri AI to launch in the EU "anytime soon". Apparently, Apple wants to use the lack of Siri AI in the EU to get its frustrated customers to "push back against the EU's regulatory approach". That's definitely an interesting...

Researchers have developed an adaptive logistic regression model that lets low-cost autonomous robots classify obstacles and steer through dense environments more effectively than several established path planning methods.

Samsung Electronics’ robot subsidiary Rainbow Robotics is accelerating the expansion of its manufacturing ‘physical artificial intelligence (AI)’ business by consecutively forming partnerships with multiple manufacturing automation companies in the North American market.The North American collaborat

Researchers in Hyderabad have developed and validated a simple, robust RP-HPLC method for quantifying baricitinib in transdermal nano-formulations and monitoring its sustained, diffusion-controlled release over 24 hours in Franz diffusion studies.

Researchers have converted waste eggshell membranes into a zinc oxide nanohybrid that protects frozen sperm, fights microbes, and improved fertility and organ health in zinc-deficient rats.

A new review in Polymer Bulletin surveys how magnetic polyphosphazene nanocomposites are synthesized, how their structure controls their properties, and how they are being applied in biomedicine, catalysis, environmental remediation, and supercapacitors.

A team led by University at Buffalo physicists has found a mathematical solution that shows how a frustrated

Inside the exhibition halls of Coex in southern Seoul on Tuesday, a bipedal humanoid robot swayed its arms to a K-pop beat. Across the room, another white robotic torso traded swift returns with a human opponent across a badminton net while robot fighters wearing oversized red and blue headgear sparred inside a miniature boxing ring. The spectacle marked the opening of Smart Life Week (SLW) 2026, a tech-driven smart city expo hosted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Running through Thursday under the theme “Designing Life with AI,” the exhibition brings together 529 participating firms, public institutions and city governments to showcase how artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting from digital screens into physical reality. This year’s event placed heavy emphasis on robotics and “physical AI,” which is capable of sensing, navigating and acting in physical environments alongside humans. At the miniature boxing ring, which drew a large crowd of onlookers, the two fighting robots

An Nvidia-backed US start-up has unveiled an open-weight model to challenge China’s dominance in freely available artificial intelligence, releasing a system that early third-party testing suggests could be one of the most token-efficient open models in its class. Reflection AI on Monday debuted Beam, its first open-weight model built for coding, reasoning and agentic tasks. The US firm said Beam was “competitive” with GLM-5.2 from Z.ai – also known as Zhipu AI – and was “approaching” Alibaba...

In optogenetics, scientists control neurons by stimulating them with light—potentially unlocking breakthroughs for conditions such as dementia, depression and blindness.

Dr. Karl Deisseroth spent hours fielding congratulatory calls after learning early Monday that he had won a Nobel Prize for medicine for helping to open a new field of brain science called optogenetics.

The newest assistant in Seoul’s school kitchens doesn't take lunch breaks, doesn't mind the steam and automatically drains boiling grease after deep-frying. And according to local students, its cooking is a hit. Gangnam District in southern Seoul said Tuesday that its ongoing school meal robot program has undergone major upgrades based on feedback from school kitchen staff. The automated cooking system, first installed in August 2023 across three local schools — Gaeil Elementary, Gaewon Middle and Seoul Robotics High School — is proving that human-robot collaboration can transform high-stress workplaces. Originally launched as a pilot program with the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education and Korea Robotics — a local firm specializing in kitchen automation — the system pairs collaborative robotic arms with custom control software and heavy-duty cooking kettles. Rather than replacing kitchen staff, these mechanical assistants handle the most physically demanding tasks, from deep-frying

STANFORD, Calif. — Dr. Karl Deisseroth spent hours fielding congratulatory calls after learning early Monday that he had won a Nobel Prize for medicine for helping to open a new field of brain science called optogenetics. But it wasn't long before the California scientist asked for a break from all the attention for a more ordinary task: He needed to make school lunches for his children, who were asleep in the family home in Stanford, where their father had been speaking in the middle of the night with journalists and well-wishers. Deisseroth, 54, shared this year’s medicine prize with two researchers in Germany for their work in optogenetics, a field that combines light with genes to switch on and off neurons in living brains. A self-described night owl, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and Stanford University professor often works past midnight. After reviewing papers and emailing his students, he said he had just gone to lie down when he got the call from the Nobel

SK Telecom, Korea’s largest wireless telecommunications operator, was the lone private-sector company at Korea’s Ground Forces Festival, where it spent five days showcasing artificial intelligence (AI) and communications technologies designed to reshape how military commanders gather information, make decisions and stay connected in contested environments. SKT said Tuesday that it participated in the festival from Thursday to Monday at Gyeryongdae airfield in Gyeryong, South Chungcheong Province, presenting AI defense transformation technologies under its T military brand. The centerpiece was its AI staff system, which combines a data platform, ontology technology and digital twins to connect battlefield information and help commanders assess situations and make tactical decisions. The system is designed to bring together data generated by troops and equipment, as well as drones, robots and sensors, then deliver relevant information quickly enough to support faster decisions. Visitors

Researchers at Harbin Institute of Technology have created a hydrophobic, nitrogen-doped nanoporous carbon from a ZIF-8 template that delivers Super-Nernstian sodium sensitivity and exceptional stability in all-solid-state ion-selective electrodes.

Author(s): Abel Thayil, Lasse Ermoneit, Lars R. Schreiber, Thomas Koprucki, and Markus KantnerSilicon spin qubits offer a promising platform for scalable quantum processors, but small and highly variable valley splittings can compromise qubit operation across a device. This work uses constrained variational optimization with epitaxial-growth-motivated constraints to design feasible germanium concentration profiles in Si/Si-Ge quantum wells, to enhance deterministic valley splitting while suppressing variability induced by alloy disorder. The principal result is a “modulated wiggle well”, which provides a large, robust, and electrically tunable valley splitting. The approach provides a systematic route for designing reproducible and epitaxially feasible silicon-qubit devices. [Phys. Rev. Applied 26, 044012] Published Mon Oct 05, 2026

Author(s): T. Poulis, G. Mani, J. Sturt, W. J. Duncan, H. Thoma, V. Hutanu, B. Ouladdiaf, I. Kibalin, M. H. Lemee, P. Manuel, A. Neubauer, C. Pfleiderer, F. M. Grosche, and P. G. NiklowitzFerromagnetic quantum critical points can be masked by emerging modulated magnetic order. Here, the authors use neutron diffraction to show that the example of NbFe 2 provides the first case, where the masking modulated order is a longitudinal spin-density wave. The latter has a large-wavelength incommensurate modulation of its low average moment and is formed from ferrimagnetic building blocks with antiparallel ferromagnetic sheets. The findings can serve as a test case for magnetic quantum order-by-disorder models. [Phys. Rev. B 114, 225106] Published Mon Oct 05, 2026

Author(s): John M. Mehlhaff, Alexander Y. Chen, Martin Luepker, and Yajie YuanThe first fully kinetic collisionless model of a rotating plasma accreting into a black hole reveals the role of pair creation and the plasma loading of the jet funnel. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 155201] Published Mon Oct 05, 2026

Researchers have developed a memory-augmented CNN-vision transformer autoencoder that uses Farneback optical flow to detect anomalies in surveillance video with up to 98.97 percent AUC on standard benchmarks.

Galactic black holes are cosmic mitochondria, powerhouses of the universe. Most of the energy these supermassive black holes produce comes from the material surrounding them: superheated plasma in their accretion disks interacting with tremendous magnetic fields. But there is a more direct way to extract energy from a black hole. It's known as the Penrose process, and a new study asks whether we could discover a signature of this process.

A new deep learning model that embeds Turing-inspired reaction-diffusion mathematics and attention mechanisms into a ResNet50 backbone classifies dermoscopic images of melanoma and benign nevi with 94.35 percent accuracy while offering explainable visual justifications for its decisions.

Green-synthesized iron oxide and zinc oxide nanoparticles made with Catharanthus roseus extract strongly inhibit Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli while boosting antioxidant enzymes, proline, protein, anthocyanins, and flavonoids in plants.

SUNY Cobleskill Ag & Tech has received a $30,000 USDA-NIFA grant to build a prototype virtual reality agricultural engineering course aimed at bringing technical training to rural, place-bound farmers.

Big Tech firms are destroying the environment in a quest for further AI gains, critics claim.

The universe may be trapped in its own comfort zone, and a researcher in the College of Engineering and Computer Science has helped explain why it cannot seem to leave. A new study suggests the universe could be locked into its current state by the same kinds of quantum effects that scientists study when trying to preserve fragile information inside a quantum computer.