In 1995, two scientists from the University of Colorado created a new state of matter by cooling a gas to a temperature just above absolute zero. At this temperature, all boson particles in the gas have the same energy, the same quantum state, and create a unified quantum wave known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.
The condensate was theorized in 1924. It took another seventy years for two scientists to create the state in an experiment that earned the Nobel Prize in Physics. Meanwhile, a couple Australian physicists have just developed an artificial intelligence that learned, recreated, and improved on the original experiment on its own.
“I didn’t expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour,” co-lead researcher Paul Wigley said in a press release. “A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the universe to run through all the combinations and work this out.”
To give the AI a head start, the Australian National University team cooled some gas down to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. The system was then tasked with cooling the gas down even further, to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. But the AI went a few steps further.
Trial after trial, the highly-specialized system found more efficient approaches to the experiment. “It did things a person wouldn’t guess, such as changing one laser’s power up and down, and compensating with another,” said Wigley. The AI also has the capacity to simultaneously monitor many more parameters than its human counterpart.
Bose-Einstein condensates are some of the universe’s coldest places. This makes them difficult to maintain and highly sensitive to disturbances. With the new AI, producing condensates is easier and faster, and also makes them easier to maintained for longer periods of time, enabling researchers to apply to them to things like measuring the Earth’s gravity and magnetic field.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.