Physicists at Penn State and Columbia University have made a groundbreaking discovery, spotting the “smoking gun” signature of semi-Dirac fermions, a type of quasiparticle predicted by theorists 16 years ago. These quasiparticles exhibit a unique property, behaving like they have mass only when moving in a certain direction. The team used a crystal of the…
collaboration on The Soothsayer / page 2
A recent analysis of publishing records has revealed a surge in the number of “precocious” scientists who become top-cited authors early in their careers. These scientists publish an average of over one paper per week and often cite their own work at a rate significantly higher than the average. While some may attribute this to…
Scientists have predicted that the undersea volcano Axial Seamount, located 470 kilometers off the Oregon coast, is likely to erupt in 2025. This prediction is based on extensive monitoring data and knowledge of the volcano’s behavior. The researchers have identified signs of magma accumulation and increased seismic activity, which indicate that the volcano is building…
NASA’s Perseverance rover has finally reached the rim of Jezero Crater on Mars after a months-long climb, revealing a 4-billion-year-old landscape never before explored. The rover has been collecting rock and dirt samples, which may hold signs of extraterrestrial life. However, bringing these samples back to Earth for analysis could cost up to $11 billion,…
Google has released an experimental reasoning AI model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which is designed to tackle complex problems in fields such as programming, math, and physics. The model is still in its early stages and requires significant computing power to run, but it has shown promising results in handling challenging puzzles involving visual…
GitHub, a Microsoft-owned platform, has announced a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool. The free version will be available to all users, with limitations on usage, and will also ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. This move aims to make AI coding tools more accessible to developers…
Cohere, a prominent AI startup, has been working with Palantir to deploy its AI models to enterprise customers. This partnership has been quietly gaining traction, with Palantir customers already using Cohere’s models for various tasks, including inference in Arabic. The collaboration highlights the growing demand for AI solutions in the enterprise sector and the increasing…
The European Union has appointed a new research head, Ekaterina Zaharieva, to reshape the world’s biggest collaborative research programme and help stop the bloc’s economic and technological downward slide. The focus will be on strengthening industry involvement in the scheme to boost innovation, with a particular emphasis on increasing private investment in research and improving…
The US Treasury Department has sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company, Sichuan Silence Information Technology, and one of its researchers, Guan Tianfeng, for a 2020 cyberattack that targeted 81,000 firewalls worldwide, including 23,000 in the US. The malware was designed to steal data and deploy ransomware, potentially causing serious injury or loss of human life. The…
Researchers at Aoyama Gakuin University and the University of Tokyo have made a groundbreaking discovery in understanding the behavior of squishy particles, which can deform by more than 10% of their size. By studying the flow and jamming of these particles, the team has developed a new model that explains how they respond to external…
