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Each is calculated to be just 20 to 30% the mass of Earth and completes one full trip around the star in only a few days.

These findings have caught many people’s attention because they point to greater precision in detecting smaller, more elusive planets.

“It’s a really exciting find – Barnard’s Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it,” said Ritvik Basant, Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and first author on the study. “It’s signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations.”

Half a million people in the UK with dangerously high blood pressure – a “silent killer” that causes tens of thousands of deaths a year – could be cured by a new treatment.

Doctors have developed a technique to burn away nodules that lead to a large amount of salt building up in the body, which increases the risk of a stroke or heart attack.

The breakthrough could mean people with primary aldosteronism – which causes one in 20 cases of high blood pressure – no longer have to have surgery or spend their lives taking the drug spironolactone to lower their risk of a stroke or heart attack.

Quantum information processing is a field that relies on the entanglement of multiple photons to process vast amounts of information. However, creating multiphoton entanglement is a challenging task. Traditional methods either use quantum nonlinear optical processes, which are inefficient for large numbers of photons, or linear beam-splitting and quantum interference, which require complex setups prone to issues like loss and crosstalk.

A team of researchers from Peking University, Southern University of Science and Technology, and the University of Science and Technology of China have made a significant breakthrough in this area.

As reported in Advanced Photonics Nexus, they developed a new approach using metasurfaces, which are planar structures capable of controlling various aspects of light, such as phase, frequency, and polarization. This innovative approach allows for the generation of multiphoton entanglement on a single , simplifying the process while making it more efficient.

The world of wireless communications is on the brink of a major leap forward. With 6G promising blazing speeds and near-zero latency, the future of connectivity is closer than ever. However, harnessing terahertz waves—which could deliver these unmatched data rates—has been hampered by interference issues. A team of researchers has now turned the tide with a revolutionary electromagnetic absorber.

Neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence modeled on the connectivity of the human brain, are driving critical breakthroughs across a wide range of scientific domains. But these models face significant threat from adversarial attacks, which can derail predictions and produce incorrect information.

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have now pioneered a novel purification strategy that counteracts adversarial assaults and preserves the robust performance of . Their research is published on the arXiv preprint server.

“Adversarial attacks to AI systems can take the form of tiny, near-invisible tweaks to input images, subtle modifications that can steer the model toward the outcome an attacker wants,” said Manish Bhattarai, Los Alamos computer scientist. “Such vulnerabilities allow malicious actors to flood digital channels with deceptive or harmful content under the guise of genuine outputs, posing a direct threat to trust and reliability in AI-driven technologies.”

In today’s AI news, Crunchbase, long known as a go-to platform for company data, has relaunched as an AI-powered solution, revolutionizing how investors, founders, and innovators gain insights into private companies. Moving beyond historical data, the new Crunchbase introduces live, predictive intelligence, providing a real-time, forward-looking view of the market. Users can now anticipate funding rounds, acquisitions, and even IPO’s.

In other advancements, EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand. The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be used to continue developing new technologies for more “green” data centers.

Meanwhile, we still didn’t get a straight-up definition of exactly what an AI agent is during Bret Taylor’s Mobile World Congress fireside chat in Barcelona on Tuesday. The Sierra founder and OpenAI board chair preferred to sidestep CNN moderator Anna Stewart’s question asking how “agentic AI” is “any different to a GenAI chatbot” by suggesting everyone hates the former but is delighted by the “empathetic” responses AI agents can serve up.

And, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks said that the U.S. should not pursue a Manhattan Project-style push to develop AI systems with “superhuman” intelligence, also known as AGI. The paper, titled “Superintelligence Strategy,” asserts that an aggressive bid by the U.S. to exclusively control superintelligent AI systems could prompt fierce retaliation from China.

In videos, as we join this episode of the Lightcone podcast we find CEO, Garry Tan and the team talking about how Andrej Karpathy recently coined the term “vibe coding” to describe how LLMs are getting so good that devs can simply “give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” They dive into this new way of programming and what it means for builders in the age of AI.

S Matthew Miller at Bloomberg Invest.” + And, “there are no authorities in science,” says A.M. Turing Award winner Richard S. Sutton. In this exclusive conversation, Amii Chief Scientific Advisor Richard S. Sutton and Amii CEO Cam Linke discuss the breakthroughs that shaped Reinforcement Learning, the journey to this moment, and what’s next for the future of artificial intelligence.

We close out with, learning to use LangGraph, JavaScript, and tools like Next.js and wxflows, from IBM’s Roy Derks, to automate transcription. Discover how to integrate open-source models like Ollama to power your AI agent.