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In a landmark development, Meta reached a proposed settlement Wednesday with U.S. states over claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to hook children.

Model checking helps automatically verify whether hardware and software systems satisfy specified requirements. It has become an important formal verification technique, but two major challenges remain: state-space explosion, which limits the size of systems that can be checked, and long verification times.

Meta agreed to pay a coalition of U.S. states as much as $16.7 billion and to impose sweeping new limits on how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram, according to a court filing Wednesday that ends a landmark trial in California.

A research team has developed a flexible near-infrared (NIR) photodetector that delivers photoresponsivity more than five times higher while maintaining its performance under repeated bending. The technology is expected to serve as a core platform for next-generation flexible optoelectronic devices, including wearable health care devices, medical diagnostic sensors and optical communication receivers.

Fuel cells, devices that generate electricity by converting the chemical energy of hydrogen or other fuels via electrochemical reactions, are promising solutions for powering large electric vehicles, industrial sites and remote facilities. To drive the necessary reactions, solid oxide fuel cells rely on ceramic, heat-resistant electrolytes, solid materials that transport ions between two electrodes.

Researchers at Princeton Engineering have created a semiconductor with unique properties: It is just a few molecules thick and can repeatedly change its properties in response to light. This is a step toward building more energy-efficient sensors, optoelectronic devices and computing technologies.

Semiconductor devices such as LEDs and transistors generally consist of two halves: an n-type, which carries negative charge via electrons, and a p-type, which moves positive charge carriers called holes that are essentially electron voids. Both halves rely on contacts that allow electric current to flow in and out with minimal energy loss. These connections, known as ohmic contacts, have been an efficiency bottleneck in thin p-type GaN semiconductors for decades because of their high resistance

For more than two decades, silicon carbide (SiC) has been promoted as the key to developing extreme-environment electronics. Yet despite its promise, the field has remained stuck at the stage of basic research, failing to result in the development of practical devices. Now, a team of researchers at Kyoto University has set out to change that.

Nestled in the wooded hills of Austria

As transistors inside microchips continue to shrink, the metal wiring that connects them is becoming a growing obstacle to faster, more energy-efficient chips. Narrower wires have greater electrical resistance, while smaller gaps between them increase interference between adjacent signals. These effects impede data transfer and raise energy consumption

Imagine finding a very old family photograph that has faded over time. Parts of the image are missing, the faces are blurry, and years spent inside a cardboard album have erased many details. Restoring such an image traditionally would require painstaking manual work or specialized software trained on thousands of examples.

MIT researchers have overcome a major challenge holding back the real-world deployment of microwave quantum technologies for advanced signal processing and secure communications.

For many parents, keeping their children safe online is a top priority. But now there

From a skin patch that changes color to flag abnormal blood sugar to a diver

A flash of light lasting a fraction of a millisecond could help create better materials for solar energy. Researchers used ultrafast heating at rates of up to 10 million degrees Celsius per second to rearrange the atoms inside a semiconductor, producing a version that generated up to 50 times more electrical current from light than the same material in its ordinary form.

From searching disaster zones and responding to chemical spills to monitoring fragile ecosystems, future robot swarms may have to act in places where direct human control is difficult or dangerous. To operate autonomously, the robots must be able to decide together which problem to address and where to go next. But collective decision-making creates its own vulnerability: Robots improve their decisions by sharing information, yet faulty machines, inaccurate observations or manipulated messages c

MIT researchers have engineered bacteria that can function as transistors, allowing the team to create living

In electronic devices, irregular fluctuations in signals are generally referred to as

Recovering valuable metals from electronic waste, mining streams and industrial waste typically requires large quantities of chemical reagents. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new molecule that could replace much of that chemistry with electricity

For thousands of years, farmers in the Pacific have lived in harmony with their environment. But rising temperatures, unpredictable rainfall and tired soils are testing even the most experienced hands.

For 30 minutes, the internet in parts of Taiwan crawled. The slowdown Thursday for people in the capital, Taipei, and six other cities and localities was part of the last phase of the island

A new physics-based analytical model can accurately predict ferroelectric behavior under real-world, complex voltages, according to a study led by University of Michigan Engineering. The model bridges the longstanding gap between fundamental switching physics and practical device engineering.

Smartwatches, phones and even some drones rely on lightweight, rechargeable energy storage systems. Once those devices wear out, many end up as electronic waste. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Energy Letters have developed a compact supercapacitor that can be quickly disassembled into reusable components. They used the devices to power a glider