Scientists have discovered the remarkable impact of reversing a standard method for combatting a key obstacle to producing fusion energy on Earth. Theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have proposed doing precisely the opposite of the prescribed procedure to sharply improve future results.
The problem, called "locked tearing modes," occurs in all today's tokamaks, doughnut-shaped magnetic facilities designed to create and control the virtually unlimited fusion power that...
Filings made by Elon Musk's legal team in his battle with Twitter have been questioned by leading bot researchers, the BBC reports.
Botometer – an online tool that tracks spam and fake accounts – was used by Musk in a countersuit against Twitter.
Using the tool, Musk's team estimated that 33% of "visible accounts" on the social media platform were "false or spam accounts."
However, Botometer creator Kaicheng Yang said the figure "doesn't mean anything."
Yang questioned the...
Japan's young adults are a sober bunch - something authorities are hoping to change with a new campaign.
The younger generation drinks less alcohol than their parents - a move that has hit taxes from beverages like sake (rice wine).
So the national tax agency has stepped in with a national competition to come up with ideas to reverse the trend.
The "Sake Viva!" campaign hopes to come up with a plan to make drinking more attractive...
Researchers at UCLA have created an edible particle that helps make lab-grown meat, known as cultured meat, with more natural muscle-like texture using a process that could be scaled up for mass production.
Led by Amy Rowat, who holds UCLA's Marcie H. Rothman Presidential Chair of Food Studies, the researchers have invented edible particles called microcarriers with customized structures and textures that help precursor muscle cells grow quickly and form muscle-like tissues. Edible microcarriers could reduce the...
Technology has enabled the creation of a vast and growing amount of information, leading to benefits (e.g., more data to learn from) as well as drawbacks (e.g., the spread of fake news). New research sought to determine how and why people value information. The research found that people grow attached to information just as they do to physical objects, even when that information cannot be translated into material outcomes.
The findings, by researchers at Carnegie...
Chinese internet giants including Alibaba, Tiktok-owner ByteDance, and Tencent have shared details of their algorithms with China's regulators for the first time, the BBC reports.
Algorithms decide what users see and the order they see it in – and are critical to driving the growth of social media platforms.
They are closely guarded by companies.
In the U.S., Meta and Alphabet have successfully argued they are trade secrets amid calls for more disclosure.
The Cyberspace Administration of China...
Thousands of federal troops have been deployed to several Mexican border cities, including Tijuana, amid a flare up in gang violence.
The northern state of Baja California was hit by a wave of arson that saw nearly 30 vehicles burned and highways blocked on Friday night, the BBC reports.
It followed a week of violence and shootings in other Mexican states.
The central government has blamed the chaos on the powerful Jalisco New Generation drug cartel.
Officials have...
Scientists at Queen Mary University of London have made two discoveries about the behaviour of "supercritical matter" — matter at the critical point at which the differences between liquids and gases seemingly disappear.
While the behaviour of matter at reasonably low temperature and pressure was well understood, the picture of matter at high temperature and pressure was blurred. Above the critical point, differences between liquids and gases seemingly disappear, and the supercritical matter was thought...
Salman Rushdie's agent has said "the news is not good," after the author was stabbed at an event in New York state.
He was attacked on stage, and is now on a ventilator and unable to speak, Andrew Wylie said in a statement, adding that the author may lose one eye.
Rushdie has suffered years of Islamist death threats after writing The Satanic Verses, published in 1988.
Police detained a suspect named as Hadi Matar, 24, from...
(California Institute of Technology) – Imagine driving home after a long day at work. Suddenly, a car careens out of an obscured side street and turns right in front of you. Luckily, your autonomous car saw this vehicle long before it came within your line of sight and slowed to avoid a crash. This might seem like magic, but a technique developed at Caltech brings the concept closer to a reality.
With the advent of autonomous...
