In 1611, Johannes Kepler—known for his laws of planetary motion—offered a solution to the question concerning the densest possible way to arrange equal-sized spheres. The famed astronomer took on this problem when asked how to stack cannonballs so as to take up the least amount of space. Kepler concluded that the best configuration is a so-called face-centered cubic lattice—an approach commonly used in grocery stores for displaying oranges: Every cannonball should rest in the cavity left by the four cannonballs (lined up in a tight, two-by-two square) lying directly below it. This was merely a conjecture, however, that was not proven until almost 400 years later by a University of Michigan mathematician.

Scientists in Australia and China are hoping to make the world's first safe and efficient non-toxic aqueous aluminum radical battery.

Efficient production of hydrogen, fuels, and even drinking water on roofs or in solar parks—this is what researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and their Canadian partners want to achieve with low-cost photoreactor modules. Now, they have reached major progress. They report their results in Joule.

A Stanford team has developed Sophia, a new way to optimize the pretraining of large language models that's twice as fast as current approaches.

New research from the University of Montana and its partners suggests artificial intelligence can match the top 1% of human thinkers on a standard test for creativity.

Reservoir computing is a promising computational framework based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which essentially maps input data onto a high-dimensional computational space, keeping some parameters of artificial neural networks (ANNs) fixed while updating others. This framework could help to improve the performance of machine learning algorithms, while also reducing the amount of data required to adequately train them.

Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new test that can predict the durability of cement in seconds to minutes—rather than the hours it takes using current methods. The test measures the behavior of water droplets on cement surfaces using computer vision on a device that costs less than $200. The researchers said the new study could help the cement industry move toward rapid and automated quality control of their materials.

Transistors that can change properties are important elements in the development of tomorrow's semiconductors. With standard transistors approaching the limit for how small they can be, having more functions on the same number of units becomes increasingly important in enabling the development of small, energy-efficient circuits for improved memory and more powerful computers. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have shown how to create new configurable transistors and exert control on a new, more precise level.

Proton-exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are a promising energy solution for reducing carbon emissions in the transport sector. As suggested by their name, these cells contain a proton-conducting membrane based on polymer materials that serves as an electrolyte. While PEMFCs could have notable advantages, their cost, durability and the availability of the fuel required to operate them will need to improve before they can be implemented on a large-scale.

A research group led by Professor Minoru Osada at the Institute for Materials and Systems for Sustainability (IMaSS), Nagoya University in Japan, in collaboration with NIMS, has developed a nanosheet device with the highest energy storage performance yet seen. Their results were published in Nano Letters.