Prof. Amir Yacoby is one of 20 U.S. scientists awarded the grant for Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems (EPiQS) investigations by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Each investigator will receive $1.6 million of unrestricted support over the next five years to pursue innovative, risky research with a potential for significant...

Physicists at Harvard University and Arizona State University in the US have succeeded in laser-cooling YbOH molecules – a crucial first step towards using these molecules to make precision measurements of the electron’s electric dipole moment (eEDM). Their work was augmented by a related effort, carried out by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Temple University, to enhance the brightness of a beam of cold YbOH. The results appear in separate ...

The growing severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and challenges in the supply chain have resulted in severe shortages of N95 masks and reports of frequent mask reuse. This practice poses serious safety risks to healthcare workers. To help decision-makers develop back-up procedures that are as safe as possible, researchers from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and other institutions teamed up to evaluate existing N95 decontamination methods and plot a practical course forward for implementing them.

The consortium issued a report detailing the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in...

A new data set reveals just how bad AI is at reasoning—and suggests that a new hybrid approach might be the best way forward.

Questions, questions: Known as CLEVRER, the data set consists of 20,000 short synthetic video clips and more than 300,000 question and answer pairings that reason about the events in the videos. Each video shows a simple world of toy objects that collide with one another following simulated physics. In one, a red rubber ball hits a blue rubber cylinder...