A new study shows how fireflies speed up or slow down their flashing to sync up with other insects, creating a beautiful and other-wordly light show.

Without the coating, bare NMC811 cathodes will survive for approximately 200 cycles. The new coating increased the cycling performance of NMC811 cathodes to more than 1,000 cycles. Furthermore, the coating/cathode combination helped the battery retain 60% of its charge after 1,300 cycles.  

Sergei Kalinin, Weston Fulton Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Tickle College of Engineering, has received a 2026 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award. One of the SEC’s highest honors, the award recognizes excellence in teaching, research and service.

Games are often called the ‘Formula 1’ of AI: clear rules, clear winners. AlphaZero-style algorithms learn by self-play: a neural network predicts moves and guides tree search. We tested this recipe on Nim, a simple children’s matchstick game that has been mathematically solved. Because the correct move is known for every position, we can measure whether an agent plays optimally across the state space. We find a gap: learning can work on small boards, but blind spots remain and performance degrades as the board grows, with predictions approaching random. This suggests impartial games often need analytic representations, not pattern learning.

By incorporating insights from canine companions, researchers enable robots to use both language and gesture as inputs to help fetch the right objects.

An international AI weather competition that sees teams from all over the world compete to produce the most accurate three to four-week weather forecasts has unveiled its latest results (13 March 2026).  

MLIP calculations successfully identify suitable dopants for a novel photocatalytic material, report researchers from Institute of Science Tokyo. As demonstrated in their latest study, a materials informatics approach could predict which ions can be stably introduced into orthorhombic Sn₃O₄, a promising and recently discovered photocatalytic tin oxide. Their experiments revealed that aluminum-doped samples achieved 16 times greater hydrogen production than the undoped material, paving the way for next-generation clean energy applications.