The profusion of hummingbird feeders in California homes has not only allowed some hummingbirds to expand their range, but has also altered the shape of their beaks. Read more on E360 →

Reversible programs run backward as easily as they run forward, saving energy in theory. After decades of research, they may soon power AI. The post How Can AI Researchers Save Energy? By Going Backward. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Congress should start compensating compassion

Recent events are very dire for research at US universities, and I will write further about those, but first a quick unrelated survey for those at such institutions.  Back in the day, it was common for physics and some other (mechanical engineering?) departments to have machine shops with professional staff.  In the last 15-20 years, there has been a huge growth in maker-spaces on campuses to modernize and augment those capabilities, though often maker-spaces are aimed at undergraduate design courses rather than doing work to support sponsored research projects (and grad students, postdocs, etc.).  At the same time, it is now easier than ever (modulo tariffs) to upload CAD drawings to a website and get a shop in another country to ship finished parts to you. Quick questions:   Does your university have a traditional or maker-space-augmented machine shop available to support sponsored research?  If so, who administers this - a department, a college/school, the office of research?  Does the shop charge competitive rates relative to outside vendors?  Are grad students trained to do work themselves, and are there professional machinists - how does that mix work? Thanks for your responses.  Feel free to email me if you'd prefer to discuss offline.

Promise and controversy continues to surround string theory as a potential unified theory of everything. In the latest episode of The Joy of Why, Cumrun Vafa discusses his progress in trying to find good, testable models hidden among the ‘swampland’ of impossible universes. The post Will We Ever Prove String Theory? first appeared on Quanta Magazine