In 1985 researchers at the University of Leiden published a paper describing the phase transitions of the heavy fermion alloy uranium ruthenium silicide (URu2Si2). That work sparked numerous studies into this fascinating material, with the phase transition at 17.5K proving particularly puzzling. Despite decades of research, the nature of this phase transition is still unclear. This March a collaboration of researchers from Cornell University, Florida State University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute, Dresden, and Leiden University shed further light on the problem by combining resonant ultrasound spectroscopy and machine learning. Their work was published in Science Advances.

Researchers have figured out how to predict El Niño events 18 months in advance using artificial intelligence.

We all have a soft spot for Prisma, the app that turns smartphone photos into stylized artwork. But the reverse process -- transforming artwork into pictures -- is no less fascinating. And it's not far from becoming real, researchers in the Netherlands said. A team of four neuroscientists at Radboud University is working on a model for inverting face sketches to synthesize photorealistic face images by using deep neural networks. The results of the study (Convolutional Sketch Inversion) were first made available in the online archive arXiv and have recently been accepted at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Amsterdam.