Tootfinder

A swarm of spherical rovers,
blown by the wind like tumbleweeds,
could enable large-scale and low-cost exploration of the Martian surface,
according to results presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences

Can Structured Templates Facilitate LLMs in Tackling Harder Tasks? : An Exploration of Scaling Laws by Difficulty
Zhichao Yang, Zhaoxin Fan, Gen Li, Yuanze Hu, Xinyu Wang, Ye Qiu, Xin Wang, Yifan Sun, Wenjun Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19069

Can Structured Templates Facilitate LLMs in Tackling Harder Tasks? : An Exploration of Scaling Laws by Difficulty
Structured, procedural reasoning is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs), especially in mathematics. While post-training methods have improved LLM performance, they still fall short in capturing deep procedural logic on complex tasks. To tackle the issue, in this paper, we first investigate this limitation and uncover a novel finding: a Scaling Law by Difficulty, which reveals that model performance follows a U-shaped curve with respect to training data complexity -- excessive low-difficu…

Learning the Wrong Lessons: Syntactic-Domain Spurious Correlations in Language Models
Chantal Shaib, Vinith M. Suriyakumar, Levent Sagun, Byron C. Wallace, Marzyeh Ghassemi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21155

Learning the Wrong Lessons: Syntactic-Domain Spurious Correlations in Language Models
For an LLM to correctly respond to an instruction it must understand both the semantics and the domain (i.e., subject area) of a given task-instruction pair. However, syntax can also convey implicit information Recent work shows that syntactic templates--frequent sequences of Part-of-Speech (PoS) tags--are prevalent in training data and often appear in model outputs. In this work we characterize syntactic templates, domain, and semantics in task-instruction pairs. We identify cases of spurious …

🤪 More people believe in conspiracy theories than you might think
#survey

More people believe in conspiracy theories than you might think
Put on your tinfoil hats: New research finds that belief in conspiracy theories might be more common in the U.S. than you might think.

Strong spin-magnon coupling in a van der Waals magnet with tunable chiral symmetry
D. Garc\'ia-Pons, J. P\'erez-Bail\'on, C. Boix-Constant, I. G\'omez-Mu\~noz, X. del Arco, S. Ma\~nas-Valero, E. Coronado, D. Zueco, M. J. Mart\'inez-P\'erez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17888

Strong spin-magnon coupling in a van der Waals magnet with tunable chiral symmetry
Quantum technologies require platforms that can coherently interface qubits with bosonic excitations. Photons have traditionally played this role in cavity quantum electrodynamics, but achieving the same goal using solid-state bosons remains challenging. Here we demonstrate strong and tunable spin-magnon coupling between molecular spin qubits and magnons in a van der Waals antiferromagnetic insulator. Using [Gd(W$_5$O$_{18}$)$_{2}$]$^{9-}$ as the spin ensemble and CrSBr as the magnonic resonato…

Parity Breaking at Faceted Crystal Growth Fronts during Ice Templating
Kaihua Ji, Alain Karma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18403 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.1…

Parity Breaking at Faceted Crystal Growth Fronts during Ice Templating
Directional solidification of water-based solutions has emerged as a versatile technique to template hierarchical porous materials, but this nonequilibrium process remains incompletely understood. Here we use phase-field simulations to shed light on the mechanism that selects the growth direction of the lamellar ice structure that templates those materials. Our results show that this selection can be understood within the general framework of spontaneous parity breaking, yielding quantitative p…

Aligning Core Aspects: Improving Vulnerability Proof-of-Concepts via Cross-Source Insights
Lingxiao Wang, Wenjing Dang, Mengyao Zhang, Yue Wang, Xianzong Wu, Sen Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18109

Aligning Core Aspects: Improving Vulnerability Proof-of-Concepts via Cross-Source Insights
For vulnerabilities, Proof-of-Concept (PoC) plays an irreplaceable role in demonstrating the exploitability. PoC reports may include critical information such as specific usage, test platforms, and more, providing essential insights for researchers. However, in reality, due to various PoC templates across PoC platforms, PoC reports extensively suffer from information deficiency, leading the suboptimal quality and limited usefulness. Fortunately, we found that information deficiency of PoC repor…

50 years ago tonight, the jerry garcia band in #rochester, in the auditorium at the masonic temple. fall ’75, show #4. audience tape of the 2nd set only: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GgRQhR1hVk [1/2]

Optical charge state manipulation of lead-vacancy centers in diamond
Yiyang Chen, Yoshiyuki Miyamoto, Eiki Ota, Ryotaro Abe, Takashi Taniguchi, Shinobu Onoda, Mutsuko Hatano, Takayuki Iwasaki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18991

Optical charge state manipulation of lead-vacancy centers in diamond
Group-IV vacancy centers in diamond exhibit excellent optical and spin coherence properties, making them highly promising and scalable spin qubit candidates. Since only specific charge states are magneto-optically active, control over the charge state is fundamental for quantum applications. Here, we realize the charge state control of lead-vacancy centers (PbV) through multi-color laser irradiation. We achieve tunable population manipulation of the negatively charged state from 0 to 89%, pavin…