A new AI-powered tool has reduced astronomers’ workload by 85% - filtering through thousands of data alerts to identify the few genuine signals caused by supernovae (powerful explosions from dying stars). The findings have been published today (10 Sept) in The Astrophysical Journal. 

In the first discovery of its kind, astronomers have found silane in the atmosphere of an ancient brown dwarf nicknamed The Accident. This molecule plays an important role in the formation of clouds in gas giant atmospheres, but for decades it has eluded detection in planets like Jupiter and Saturn. The discovery was made possible with complementary observations from the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Gemini South telescope in Chile and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Beaked whales are considered one of the least understood mammals, but pressure from their predators may be driving these whales to exhibit inconspicuous surface behavior. Using passive acoustic monitoring, hydrophones, and autonomous recorders, researchers were able to capture nine audio recordings, visually spotting the whales four separate times. They discuss their findings in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Dr. Tanja Stratmann has been awarded the prestigious Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Starting in 2026, Dr. Stratmann will spend five years researching the nitrogen cycle of living and fossil sponges at MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen.

Artificial intelligence is now part of our daily lives, with the subsequent pressing need for larger, more complex models. However, the demand for ever-increasing power and computing capacity is rising faster than the performance traditional computers can provide.

To overcome these limitations, research is moving towards innovative technologies such as physical neural networks, analogue circuits that directly exploit the laws of physics (properties of light beams, quantum phenomena) to process information. Their potential is at the heart of the study published by the prestigious journal Nature. It is the outcome of collaboration between several international institutes, including the Politecnico di Milano, the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Stanford University, the University of Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute.

In this study, we propose a high quality-factor (Q-factor) optical cavity that offers a breakthrough solution to the intrinsic trade-off between optical chirality density and mode loss.