Researchers from the Illinois Grainger College of Engineering are the first to demonstrate a simple and tunable method for realizing asymmetric couplings in integrated photonics.

An unexpectedly strong solar storm rocked our planet on April 23, 2023, sparking auroras as far south as southern Texas in the U.S. and taking the world by surprise. 

Two days earlier, the Sun blasted a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a cloud of energetic particles, magnetic fields, and solar material — toward Earth. But the CME wasn’t especially fast or massive, suggesting the storm would be minor. But it became severe.

Using NASA heliophysics missions, new studies of this storm and others are helping scientists learn why some CMEs have more intense effects — and better predict the impacts of future solar eruptions on our lives.

Researchers at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and their collaborators examine how common food waste recycling methods, including composting, could have a huge impact on greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and the sparing of natural resources such as land and water. Food loss and waste, in particular, are “a big deal,” says Zhengxia Dou. They account for almost a third of the food produced for human consumption.

University of Washington researchers developed the game AI Puzzlers to show kids an area where AI systems still typically and blatantly fail: solving certain reasoning puzzles. In the game, users get a chance to solve puzzles by completing patterns of colored blocks. They can then ask various AI chatbots to solve and have the systems explain their solutions — which they nearly always fail to do accurately.