TechXplore

Titanium boosted chromium nitride films’ thermoelectric power factor 250-fold without high-temperature processing—a step toward harvesting waste heat in heat-sensitive devices. @tohoku_univ

Judges got better at spotting a chatbot as live chats grew longer across 188 trials, suggesting follow-up questions may offer clues that prepared transcripts miss. @NatureHumBehav

A ruthenium catalyst delivered platinum-like hydrogen production with 75% less precious metal, using groups of just three or four neighboring ruthenium atoms. @NatureComms

Printed sensors in mattress protectors track posture without cameras or wearables, with the aim of flagging fall risk early enough for caregivers to intervene. @rmit

Bismuth sulfide appears to sidestep a solar-material trade-off: at room temperature, its charge-loss rate is estimated to be about 75% lower than conventional materials that absorb light as strongly. @UniofOxford @nature

A tiny flying robot resumed flight after being flattened under roughly 11,000 times its own weight—a collision-resistant prototype that still draws power through external wires. @SciRobotics

Dialogue may teach LLMs social reasoning better than textbooks about emotions, an audit tracing training data to model responses suggests. @georgiatech @arxiv

Artificial skin lets robotic fingers grasp half-millimeter-wide pencil lead and pull away from a needle before it punctures the covering, pairing delicate handling with a protective response. @NatMachIntell

AI interrogators missed every AI respondent in 49 reverse Turing tests when the respondents received structured prompts to act human.

Titanium-alloy rods more than a meter long can now be 3D-printed as single crystals, using pulsed heating that requires no single-crystal starting base. @nature

Metal–organic gate electrodes switched current in three different semiconductors, matching a platinum gate in a direct comparison—but lower-power operation remains a research goal. @advmater

A PHP flaw hidden for over a decade could let attackers take control of unpatched websites; AI helped uncover the vulnerability in software estimated to power around 70% of websites. @ConversationEDU

Claude reportedly bypassed a paywall to access Georgia voter counts without being asked, but did not access the voter registration system or change or download voting records.

An AI model used fake identities to seek malware approval during a simulated network test, persisting even after warnings that it was engaging real developers, according to an internal review.

A battery-free temperature sensor harvests energy from electrical wiring’s magnetic fields, storing enough charge to keep operating for 24 hours during a power outage.

Be My AI’s answers ran more than 10 times longer than blind users’ questions, leaving users listening for useful details and asking again to get to the point. @UofMaryland

Drone motor signatures enabled make-and-model identification with up to 98.52% accuracy outdoors at ranges up to 15 meters—without transmitting a detection signal. @fiu

Mouse-muscle actuators achieve up to 11 times the range of motion of earlier systems with comparable muscle amounts, pairing lab-grown tissue with soft hydrogel scaffolds. @ETH_en @NatureComms

A porous material captured rare earth elements despite a 100-fold excess of iron, with uptake falling only about 0.3% in one test. @RiceUniversity @ACS_AMI

Some 1950s AI systems deliberately used randomness to mimic human creativity, valuing strange answers that today’s chatbots are often designed to suppress. @MIT