Energy
The darkest fabric ever made is now a dress
A bird's ultrablack feathers inspired this versatile material. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. There is black, and then there is The shade defined as a black that reflects less than 0.5 percent of the light that hits it, is used on everything from telescopes to cameras. This uniquely dark color is not easy to produce and may appear less black when it is viewed at an angle. To find a better way to reproduce this cool color, a team at Cornell University looked to nature.
Species in Chernobyl disaster zone is mutating to feed on nuclear radiation
Trump's MRI scan results released by White House Real estate experts sound alarm over toxic mortgage trap and wave of demolitions across America: Heading to'extinction' Is this the END of Ozempic? Trump deploys 250 agents to New Orleans for'Swamp Sweep' as terrified immigrants shutter restaurants The Kennedy brother who put a pillow over Marilyn Monroe's face as she screamed... and a deathbed phone call promised to'shock the whole world' - by author JAMES PATTERSON Billionaire power couple have given away so much of their fortune they've been taken off Forbes list of America's highest earners Mom who spent 10 years'gentle parenting' admits it was a mistake: 'My kids are anxious, insecure and entitled' Nashville neighbors can see what's REALLY going on with Nicole Kidman. Tina Turner's husband, 69, finds love again with 60-year-old American widow as they're seen on designer shopping spree in Milan Record cold for 235 million Americans starting in just HOURS as polar vortex brings'most extreme cold on Earth' The single injection that means you could come off statins for LIFE: Experts hail'fabulous' breakthrough that permanently cuts cholesterol... and may mean an end to difficult statin side-effects Doctor and his wife are executed in garage of their $1.3m home... then body'connected to crime' is found in burning car 70 miles away There's always been whispers about Tupac's sexuality... now for first time, friends and the boys he kissed share flamboyant tales of eyeshadow, nail varnish and his secret'longings' Even I was once overweight. So trust me, this 30 DAY detox plan will get you thin WITHOUT Ozempic... but if you want to stay skinny, you'll have to make one major sacrifice: JILLIAN MICHAELS Trader Joe's fans go wild for a product that has'finally' returned to stores... 'I dream about it' Lululemon's cancelled founder pokes fun at company's recent losses: 'Becoming The Gap with cheap acrylic sweaters' Nearly 40 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, scientists have discovered a form of life that's thriving on the radiation that's been left behind. A strange black fungus called Cladosporium sphaerospermum, found growing on abandoned reactor walls, hasn't just learned to survive the deadly fallout, but several strains now grow faster when radiation is present and even move towards it.
Amazon slashed Birdfy smart bird feeder cameras to their lowest prices ever for Cyber Monday
These smart bird feeders use connected cameras to capture up-close images and videos of visiting birds. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Birds are difficult to photograph. They move quickly, arrive sporadically, and have an uncanny knack for avoiding the camera. Birdfy's smart bird feeders make it easy to capture photos and videos of your feathered friends with a connected camera.
Probabilistic Digital Twin for Misspecified Structural Dynamical Systems via Latent Force Modeling and Bayesian Neural Networks
This work presents a probabilistic digital twin framework for response prediction in dynamical systems governed by misspecified physics. The approach integrates Gaussian Process Latent Force Models (GPLFM) and Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) to enable end-to-end uncertainty-aware inference and prediction. In the diagnosis phase, model-form errors (MFEs) are treated as latent input forces to a nominal linear dynamical system and jointly estimated with system states using GPLFM from sensor measurements. A BNN is then trained on posterior samples to learn a probabilistic nonlinear mapping from system states to MFEs, while capturing diagnostic uncertainty. For prognosis, this mapping is used to generate pseudo-measurements, enabling state prediction via Kalman filtering. The framework allows for systematic propagation of uncertainty from diagnosis to prediction, a key capability for trustworthy digital twins. The framework is demonstrated using four nonlinear examples: a single degree of freedom (DOF) oscillator, a multi-DOF system, and two established benchmarks -- the Bouc-Wen hysteretic system and the Silverbox experimental dataset -- highlighting its predictive accuracy and robustness to model misspecification.
On the Effect of Regularization on Nonparametric Mean-Variance Regression
Wong-Toi, Eliot, Boyd, Alex, Fortuin, Vincent, Mandt, Stephan
Uncertainty quantification is vital for decision-making and risk assessment in machine learning. Mean-variance regression models, which predict both a mean and residual noise for each data point, provide a simple approach to uncertainty quantification. However, overparameterized mean-variance models struggle with signal-to-noise ambiguity, deciding whether prediction targets should be attributed to signal (mean) or noise (variance). At one extreme, models fit all training targets perfectly with zero residual noise, while at the other, they provide constant, uninformative predictions and explain the targets as noise. We observe a sharp phase transition between these extremes, driven by model regularization. Empirical studies with varying regularization levels illustrate this transition, revealing substantial variability across repeated runs. To explain this behavior, we develop a statistical field theory framework, which captures the observed phase transition in alignment with experimental results. This analysis reduces the regularization hyperparameter search space from two dimensions to one, significantly lowering computational costs. Experiments on UCI datasets and the large-scale ClimSim dataset demonstrate robust calibration performance, effectively quantifying predictive uncertainty.
Test Time Training for AC Power Flow Surrogates via Physics and Operational Constraint Refinement
Dogoulis, Panteleimon, Alizadeh, Mohammad Iman, Kubler, Sylvain, Cordy, Maxime
Power Flow (PF) calculation based on machine learning (ML) techniques offer significant computational advantages over traditional numerical methods but often struggle to maintain full physical consistency. This paper introduces a physics-informed test-time training (PI-TTT) framework that enhances the accuracy and feasibility of ML-based PF surrogates by enforcing AC power flow equalities and operational constraints directly at inference time. The proposed method performs a lightweight self-supervised refinement of the surrogate outputs through few gradient-based updates, enabling local adaptation to unseen operating conditions without requiring labeled data. Extensive experiments on the IEEE 14-, 118-, and 300-bus systems and the PEGASE 1354-bus network show that PI-TTT reduces power flow residuals and operational constraint violations by one to two orders of magnitude compared with purely ML-based models, while preserving their computational advantage. The results demonstrate that PI-TTT provides fast, accurate, and physically reliable predictions, representing a promising direction for scalable and physics-consistent learning in power system analysis.
AdS/Deep-Learning made easy II: neural network-based approaches to holography and inverse problems
Jeong, Hyun-Sik, Kim, Hanse, Kim, Keun-Young, Yun, Gaya, Yu, Hyeonwoo, Yun, Kwan
We apply physics-informed machine learning (PIML) to solve inverse problems in holography and classical mechanics, focusing on neural ordinary differential equations (Neural ODEs) and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for solving non-linear differential equations of motion. First, we introduce holographic inverse problems and demonstrate how PIML can reconstruct bulk spacetime and effective potentials from boundary quantum data. To illustrate this, two case studies are explored: the QCD equation of state in holographic QCD and $T$-linear resistivity in holographic strange metals. Additionally, we explicitly show how such holographic problems can be analogized to inverse problems in classical mechanics, modeling frictional forces with neural networks. We also explore Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) as an alternative to traditional neural networks, offering more efficient solutions in certain cases. This manuscript aim to provide a systematic framework for using neural networks in inverse problems, serving as a comprehensive reference for researchers in machine learning for high-energy physics, with methodologies that also have broader applications in mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences.
Hard-Constrained Neural Networks with Physics-Embedded Architecture for Residual Dynamics Learning and Invariant Enforcement in Cyber-Physical Systems
Spotorno, Enzo Nicolรกs, Filho, Josafat Leal, Frรถhlich, Antรดnio Augusto
This paper presents a framework for physics-informed learning in complex cyber-physical systems governed by differential equations with both unknown dynamics and algebraic invariants. First, we formalize the Hybrid Recurrent Physics-Informed Neural Network (HRPINN), a general-purpose architecture that embeds known physics as a hard structural constraint within a recurrent integrator to learn only residual dynamics. Second, we introduce the Projected HRPINN (PHRPINN), a novel extension that integrates a predict-project mechanism to strictly enforce algebraic invariants by design. The framework is supported by a theoretical analysis of its representational capacity. We validate HRPINN on a real-world battery prognostics DAE and evaluate PHRPINN on a suite of standard constrained benchmarks. The results demonstrate the framework's potential for achieving high accuracy and data efficiency, while also highlighting critical trade-offs between physical consistency, computational cost, and numerical stability, providing practical guidance for its deployment.
Closing the Generalization Gap in Parameter-efficient Federated Edge Learning
Du, Xinnong, Lyu, Zhonghao, Cao, Xiaowen, Wen, Chunyang, Cui, Shuguang, Xu, Jie
Federated edge learning (FEEL) provides a promising foundation for edge artificial intelligence (AI) by enabling collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, limited and heterogeneous local datasets, as well as resource-constrained deployment, severely degrade both model generalization and resource utilization, leading to a compromised learning performance. Therefore, we propose a parameter-efficient FEEL framework that jointly leverages model pruning and client selection to tackle such challenges. First, we derive an information-theoretic generalization statement that characterizes the discrepancy between training and testing function losses and embed it into the convergence analysis. It reveals that a larger local generalization statement can undermine the global convergence. Then, we formulate a generalization-aware average squared gradient norm bound minimization problem, by jointly optimizing the pruning ratios, client selection, and communication-computation resources under energy and delay constraints. Despite its non-convexity, the resulting mixed-integer problem is efficiently solved via an alternating optimization algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed design achieves superior learning performance than state-of-the-art baselines, validating the effectiveness of coupling generalization-aware analysis with system-level optimization for efficient FEEL.
Learning to Predict Aboveground Biomass from RGB Images with 3D Synthetic Scenes
Forests play a critical role in global ecosystems by supporting biodiversity and mitigating climate change via carbon sequestration. Accurate aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation is essential for assessing carbon storage and wildfire fuel loads, yet traditional methods rely on labor-intensive field measurements or remote sensing approaches with significant limitations in dense vegetation. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based method for estimating AGB from a single ground-based RGB image. We frame this as a dense prediction task, introducing AGB density maps, where each pixel represents tree biomass normalized by the plot area and each tree's image area. We leverage the recently introduced synthetic 3D SPREAD dataset, which provides realistic forest scenes with per-image tree attributes (height, trunk and canopy diameter) and instance segmentation masks. Using these assets, we compute AGB via allometric equations and train a model to predict AGB density maps, integrating them to recover the AGB estimate for the captured scene. Our approach achieves a median AGB estimation error of 1.22 kg/m^2 on held-out SPREAD data and 1.94 kg/m^2 on a real-image dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first method to estimate aboveground biomass directly from a single RGB image, opening up the possibility for a scalable, interpretable, and cost-effective solution for forest monitoring, while also enabling broader participation through citizen science initiatives.