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Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, noted for strengths in physics, economics, and public policy.
Princeton physicists calculate that heating a fusion plasma before adding density is the lowest-energy route to ignition. The paper, in Physical Review Letters, is theory only, so the ordering still has to be tested on hardware.
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Theoretical computer scientists co-led by Princeton's Pravesh Kothari used two AI models to narrow the bounds of the Grothendieck constant. The preprint is not yet peer reviewed, and its authors say the models are weaker at judging a result's significance.
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Princeton University's study found about 5% of nearly 3,000 new English Wikipedia articles from August 2024 contained substantial AI-generated text. Wikipedia had banned writing with large language models by March 2026, a Wired book excerpt reports.
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UC San Diego-led researchers report perovskite solar cells and LEDs at around 24% to 26% efficiency, grown with a temporary liquid phase. In the one durability result the report describes, the solar cells kept most of their efficiency through eight weeks of simulated sunlight.
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Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory calculations suggest heating plasma before raising its density could reach fusion ignition with far less energy. The Physical Review Letters paper keeps the Lawson criterion's endpoint and ranks the routes toward it by energy cost.
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PhAI Labs' JEPA-Anything splits a world model's prediction into several modules, cutting error 35% against a standard JEPA on a Pong task. Its reported comparisons use that one baseline, and its liver cancer pick has only lab and mouse data.
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Researchers who let supernova debris spread unevenly matched the element ratios of odd Milky Way halo stars as well as or better than a hypernova model did. That undercuts the chemical case for hypernovas, though MIT's Anna Frebel says they remain plausible.
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Nanjing University's Long Yang and coauthors argue in Nature Cities that cities alter their own storms through heat, building roughness and aerosols. They add that green roofs and sponge-city schemes built against floods and heat can feed back on local rainfall as well.
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Economists Leonardo D'Amico, Evan Soltas and Audrey Wang find approving a standard US apartment building took 1.5 years in 2023, up from 0.6 in 2000. For developers and city halls, that puts a number on the part of housing delay set by local review rules.
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Claude Opus 4.8 got six days, $3,000 in credits and a GPU budget to answer two unpublished NeurIPS questions. The papers' original authors graded the output and rejected both.
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Pulsar Fusion plans a 2027 space demo of a fusion engine that has so far briefly held krypton plasma in place. Helicity Space's CEO says space travel will change within a decade, though the only engine test described so far made plasma and reported no fusion.
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Labs at EPFL and the Weizmann Institute each measured quasiparticles with a quarter of an electron's charge in the ν = 1/2 quantum Hall state. The agreement settles the charge of a state thought to be non-Abelian, though the exchange behavior a topological qubit would need was not tested.
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Physicists mapped the electronic topology of 8,872 atomically thin materials and named over 1,600 twisting candidates in two Science papers. The lists are calculations that tell labs where to look, and testing them in twisted devices comes next.
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Gregory Scholes helped build the case for quantum coherence in photosynthesis after 2007 and now doubts it; his recent papers get quantumlike behavior out of networks of ordinary classical oscillators.
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In 79 US toddlers surveyed three times, words that parents said their child mostly overheard from adult conversation were recognised at 24 and 30 months but not at 18. Every measure came from the parents.
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Yale researchers read the original makeup of planetesimals that melted so thoroughly their textures vanished, and place the Solar System's preference for heat-formed rock beads inside the first million years.
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Rodrigo Adao and three co-authors used 2017-19 data from all 50 states and D.C. to infer whose income U.S. tariff policy treated as most valuable. The answer sorts by industry far more than by geography.
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A Yale-led team could not sample planetesimals from the first million years, because every one of them melted, so it reconstructed their make-up from sulfur and iron oxidation in iron meteorites and got 8% to 17% icy dust.
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Princeton's Max Springer says a publicly available AI assistant unshuffled Georgia's May primary ballot records and then told him which public files it needed to attach names to them. The flaw was documented in 2022.
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A Science Advances study ties winter pollution across northern India to how often Mediterranean storm systems arrive. The storm count is itself linked to ocean temperature patterns visible the previous autumn.
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Science · August 20, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers
Science · August 15, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers