SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg thought his fellow Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk was behaving like an alarmist. Mr. Musk, the entrepreneur behind SpaceX and the electric-car maker Tesla, had taken it upon himself to warn the world that artificial intelligence was “potentially more dangerous than nukes” in television interviews and on social media. So, […]
Call it the most powerful scientific tool ever built. Call it a new paradigm of computing. Just don’t call it slow, because whatever number you look at, Summit — which made its debut Friday at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — is flat-out fast. This massive machine, powered by 27,648 of our Volta Tensor Core […]
Last year’s Computex showed us how the PC would evolve. This year, that evolution began to feel concrete. Hardware is getting better across the board, as you’d expect. But there’s also a renewed focus on productivity — doing work that can’t be done on a phone or tablet — as well as fixing common issues. […]
Big deal alert: Bose headphones and speakers are on sale at Amazon. Amazon constantly hides deals like this for some reason, and either refuses to put them in the daily deals section or buries them super deep — because why make things easy? But just like Facebook stalking and finding out everything you need to […]
There are several indications that our current understanding of the particles and forces that govern normal matter is wrong. Many of these areas seem to involve neutrinos, and that’s in part because these particles rarely interact with normal matter, making them incredibly difficult to detect. But we’ve gradually gotten better at building detectors, which has […]
A team of scientists working at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has confirmed a special property known as “chirality—which potentially could be exploited to transmit and store data in a new way—in nanometers-thick samples of multilayer materials that have a disordered structure. While most electronic devices rely on the flow […]
While some investment professionals believe that the bull market in U.S. stocks is about to run its course, and that investors should look abroad for the best potential gains in equities, Rebecca Patterson, the chief investment officer (CIO) at Bessemer Trust, disagrees. “We’ve found over the last few decades, when you have market panic, even […]
When scientists announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, it was a huge triumph for the Standard Model of particle physics, the leading theory of subatomic matter. The particle had been predicted to explain why other particles have mass. But finding this particle was not the end of its story—rather, it was a […]
Sometimes a good theory just needs to right materials to make it work. That’s the case with recent findings by UT’s physicists and their colleagues, who designed a two-dimensional magnetic system that points to the possibility of devices with increased security and efficiency, using only a small amount of energy. By exploiting a hidden symmetry […]
Someday, the gasoline you buy might trace its heritage to carbon dioxide pulled straight out of the sky rather than from oil pumped out of the ground. By removing emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into fresh fuels, engineers at a Canadian firm have demonstrated a scalable and cost-effective way to make […]
Five-sixths of the universe’s stuff seems to be missing, and we just can’t find it. It’s called “dark matter,” and scientists have gone looking for it with some of the world’s largest, most expensive experiments. Time and time again, these experiments come up empty handed. Most recently, the scientists at the XENON1T experiment, a literal […]
Fusion may have a dark side. A shadowy hypothetical process called “dark fusion” could be occurring throughout the cosmos, a new study suggests. The standard type of fusion occurs when two atomic nuclei unite to form a new element, releasing energy in the process. “This is why the sun shines,” says physicist Sam McDermott of […]
