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AI for Particle Physics: Searching for Anomalies

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In 1930, a young physicist named Carl D. Anderson was tasked by his mentor with measuring the energies of cosmic rays—particles arriving at high speed from outer space. Anderson built an improved version of a cloud chamber, a device that visually records the trajectories of particles. In 1932, he saw evidence that confusingly combined the properties of protons and electrons. “A situation began to develop that had its awkward aspects,” he wrote many years after winning a Nobel Prize at the age of 31. Anderson had accidentally discovered antimatter.

Four years after his first discovery, he codiscovered another elementary particle, the muon. This one prompted one physicist to ask, “Who ordered that?”

a photo shows a man in a suit sitting beside a large laboratory apparatus.

 a circular black-and-white image shows curved particle tracks. Carl Anderson [top] sits beside the magnet cloud chamber he used to discover the positron. His cloud-chamber photograph [bottom] from 1932 shows the curved track of a positron, the first known antimatter particle. Caltech Archives & Special Collections

Over the decades since then, particle physicists have built increasingly sophisticated instruments of exploration. At the apex of these physics-finding machines sits the Large Hadron Collider, which in 2022 started its third operational run. This underground ring, 27 kilometers in circumference and straddling the border between France and Switzerland, was built to slam subatomic particles together at near light speed and test deep theories of the universe. Physicists from around the world turn to the LHC, hoping to find something new. They’re not sure what, but they hope to find it.

It’s the latest manifestation of a rich tradition. Throughout the history of science, new instruments have prompted hunts for the unexpected. Galileo Galilei built telescopes and found Jupiter’s moons. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek built microscopes and noticed “animalcules, very prettily a-moving.” And still today, people peer through lenses and pore through data in search of patterns they hadn’t hypothesized. Nature’s secrets don’t always come with spoilers, and so we gaze into the unknown, ready for anything.

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But novel, fundamental aspects of the universe are growing less forthcoming. In a sense, we’ve plucked the lowest-hanging fruit. We know to a good approximation what the building blocks of matter are. The Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the currently known elementary particles, has been in place since the 1970s. Nature can still surprise us, but it typically requires larger or finer instruments, more detailed or expansive data, and faster or more flexible analysis tools.

Those analysis tools include a form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. Researchers train complex statistical models to find patterns in their data, patterns too subtle for human eyes to see, or too rare for a single human to encounter. At the LHC, which smashes together protons to create immense bursts of energy that decay into other short-lived particles of matter, a theorist might predict some new particle or interaction and describe what its signature would look like in the LHC data, often using a simulation to create synthetic data. Experimentalists would then collect petabytes of measurements and run a machine learning algorithm that compares them with the simulated data, looking for a match. Usually, they come up empty. But maybe new algorithms can peer into corners they haven’t considered.

A New Path for Particle Physics

“You’ve heard probably that there’s a crisis in particle physics,” says Tilman Plehn, a theoretical physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany. At the LHC and other high-energy physics facilities around the world, the experimental results have failed to yield insights on new physics. “We have a lot of unhappy theorists who thought that their model would have been discovered, and it wasn’t,” Plehn says.

Person wearing a patterned shirt against a pale blue background.

Tilman Plehn

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“We have a lot of unhappy theorists who thought that their model would have been discovered, and it wasn’t.”

Gregor Kasieczka, a physicist at the University of Hamburg, in Germany, recalls the field’s enthusiasm when the LHC began running in 2008. Back then, he was a young graduate student and expected to see signs of supersymmetry, a theory predicting heavier versions of the known matter particles. The presumption was that “we turn on the LHC, and supersymmetry will jump in your face, and we’ll discover it in the first year or so,” he tells me. Eighteen years later, supersymmetry remains in the theoretical realm. “I think this level of exuberant optimism has somewhat gone.”

The result, Plehn says, is that models for all kinds of things have fallen in the face of data. “And I think we’re going on a different path now.”

That path involves a kind of machine learning called unsupervised learning. In unsupervised learning, you don’t teach the AI to recognize your specific prediction—signs of a particle with this mass and this charge. Instead, you might teach it to find anything out of the ordinary, anything interesting—which could indicate brand new physics. It’s the equivalent of looking with fresh eyes at a starry sky or a slide of pond scum. The problem is, how do you automate the search for something “interesting”?

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Going Beyond the Standard Model

The Standard Model leaves many questions unanswered. Why do matter particles have the masses they do? Why do neutrinos have mass at all? Where is the particle for transmitting gravity, to match those for the other forces? Why do we see more matter than antimatter? Are there extra dimensions? What is dark matter—the invisible stuff that makes up most of the universe’s matter and that we assume to exist because of its gravitational effect on galaxies? Answering any of these questions could open the door to new physics, or fundamental discoveries beyond the Standard Model.

A long blue accelerator tube marked \u201cLHC\u201d runs through an underground tunnel.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN accelerates protons to near light speed before smashing them together in hopes of discovering “new physics.”

CERN

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“Personally, I’m excited for portal models of dark sectors,” Kasieczka says, as if reading from a Marvel film script. He asks me to imagine a mirror copy of the Standard Model out there somewhere, sharing only one “portal” particle with the Standard Model we know and love. It’s as if this portal particle has a second secret family.

Kasieczka says that in the LHC’s third run, scientists are splitting their efforts roughly evenly between measuring more precisely what they know to exist and looking for what they don’t know to exist. In some cases, the former could enable the latter. The Standard Model predicts certain particle properties and the relationships between them. For example, it correctly predicted a property of the electron called the magnetic moment to about one part in a trillion. And precise measurements could turn up internal inconsistencies. “Then theorists can say, ‘Oh, if I introduce this new particle, it fixes this specific problem that you guys found. And this is how you look for this particle,’” Kasieczka says.

A colorful visualization shows many particle tracks radiating outward from a collision point.

An image from a single collision at the LHC shows an unusually complex spray of particles, flagged as anomalous by machine learning algorithms.

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CERN

What’s more, the Standard Model has occasionally shown signs of cracks. Certain particles containing bottom quarks, for example, seem to decay into other particles in unexpected ratios. Plehn finds the bottom-quark incongruities intriguing. “Year after year, I feel they should go away, and they don’t. And nobody has a good explanation,” he says. “I wouldn’t even know who I would shout at”—the theorists or the experimentalists—“like, ‘Sort it out!’”

Exasperation isn’t exactly the right word for Plehn’s feelings, however. Physicists feel gratified when measurements reasonably agree with expectations, he says. “But I think deep down inside, we always hope that it looks unreasonable. Everybody always looks for the anomalous stuff. Everybody wants to see the standard explanation fail. First, it’s fame”—a chance for a Nobel—“but it’s also an intellectual challenge, right? You get excited when things don’t work in science.”

How Unsupervised AI Can Probe for New Physics

Now imagine you had a machine to find all the times things don’t work in science, to uncover all the anomalous stuff. That’s how researchers are using unsupervised learning. One day over ice cream, Plehn and a friend who works at the software company SAP began discussing autoencoders, one type of unsupervised learning algorithm. “He tells me that autoencoders are what they use in industry to see if a network was hacked,” Plehn remembers. “You have, say, a hundred computers, and they have network traffic. If the network traffic [to one computer] changes all of a sudden, the computer has been hacked, and they take it offline.”

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a person wearing a hard hat walks down an aisle.
Photo show rows of electronic racks filled with cables and equipment inside a data-acquisition room.

In the LHC’s central data-acquisition room [top], incoming detector data flows through racks of electronics and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) cards [bottom] that decide which collision events to keep.

Fermilab/CERN

Autoencoders are neural networks that start with an input—it could be an image of a cat, or the record of a computer’s network traffic—and compress it, like making a tiny JPEG or MP3 file, and then decompress it. Engineers train them to compress and decompress data so that the output matches the input as closely as possible. Eventually a network becomes very good at that task. But if the data includes some items that are relatively rare—such as white tigers, or hacked computers’ traffic—the network performs worse on these, because it has less practice with them. The difference between an input and its reconstruction therefore signals how anomalous that input is.

“This friend of mine said, ‘You can use exactly our software, right?’” Plehn remembers. “‘It’s exactly the same question. Replace computers with particles.’” The two imagined feeding the autoencoder signatures of particles from a collider and asking: Are any of these particles not like the others? Plehn continues: “And then we wrote up a joint grant proposal.”

It’s not a given that AI will find new physics. Even learning what counts as interesting is a daunting hurdle. Beginning in the 1800s, men in lab coats delegated data processing to women, whom they saw as diligent and detail oriented. Women annotated photos of stars, and they acted as “computers.” In the 1950s, women were trained to scan bubble chambers, which recorded particle trajectories as lines of tiny bubbles in fluid. Physicists didn’t explain to them the theory behind the events, only what to look for based on lists of rules.

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But, as the Harvard science historian Peter Galison writes in Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Physics, his influential account of how physicists’ tools shape their discoveries, the task was “subtle, difficult, and anything but routinized,” requiring “three-dimensional visual intuition.” He goes on: “Even within a single experiment, judgment was required—this was not an algorithmic activity, an assembly line procedure in which action could be specified fully by rules.”

Person in a suit with dark hair against a blue background.Gregor Kasieczka

“We are not looking for flying elephants but instead a few extra elephants than usual at the local watering hole.”

Over the last decade, though, one thing we’ve learned is that AI systems can, in fact, perform tasks once thought to require human intuition, such as mastering the ancient board game Go. So researchers have been testing AI’s intuition in physics. In 2019, Kasieczka and his collaborators announced the LHC Olympics 2020, a contest in which participants submitted algorithms to find anomalous events in three sets of (simulated) LHC data. Some teams correctly found the anomalous signal in one dataset, but some falsely reported one in the second set, and they all missed it in the third. In 2020, a research collective called Dark Machines announced a similar competition, which drew more than 1,000 submissions of machine learning models. Decisions about how to score them led to different rankings, showing that there’s no best way to explore the unknown.

Another way to test unsupervised learning is to play revisionist history. In 1995, a particle dubbed the top quark turned up at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), in Illinois. But what if it actually hadn’t? Researchers applied unsupervised learning to LHC data collected in 2012, pretending they knew almost nothing about the top quark. Sure enough, the AI revealed a set of anomalous events that were clustered together. Combined with a bit of human intuition, they pointed toward something like the top quark.

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Person with long hair wearing a sweater and light-colored top against a blue background.

Georgia Karagiorgi

“An algorithm that can recognize any kind of disturbance would be a win.”

That exercise underlines the fact that unsupervised learning can’t replace physicists just yet. “If your anomaly detector detects some kind of feature, how do you get from that statement to something like a physics interpretation?” Kasieczka says. “The anomaly search is more a scouting-like strategy to get you to look into the right corner.” Georgia Karagiorgi, a physicist at Columbia University, agrees. “Once you find something unexpected, you can’t just call it quits and be like, ‘Oh, I discovered something,’” she says. “You have to come up with a model and then test it.”

Kyle Cranmer, a physicist and data scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who played a key role in the discovery of the Higgs boson particle in 2012, also says that human expertise can’t be dismissed. “There’s an infinite number of ways the data can look different from what you expected,” he says, “and most of them aren’t interesting.” Physicists might be able to recognize whether a deviation suggests some plausible new physical phenomenon, rather than just noise. “But how you try to codify that and make it explicit in some algorithm is much less straightforward,” Cranmer says. Ideally, the guidelines would be general enough to exclude the unimaginable without eliminating the merely unimagined. “That’s gonna be your Goldilocks situation.”

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In his 1987 book How Experiments End, Harvard’s Galison writes that scientific instruments can “import assumptions built into the apparatus itself.” He tells me about a 1973 experiment that looked for a phenomenon called neutral currents, signaled by an absence of a so-called heavy electron (later renamed the muon). One team initially used a trigger left over from previous experiments, which recorded events only if they produced those heavy electrons—even though neutral currents, by definition, produce none. As a result, for some time the researchers missed the phenomenon and wrongly concluded that it didn’t exist. Galison says that the physicists’ design choice “allowed the discovery of [only] one thing, and it blinded the next generation of people to this new discovery. And that is always a risk when you’re being selective.”

How AI Could Miss—or Fake—New Physics

I ask Galison if by automating the search for interesting events, we’re letting the AI take over the science. He rephrases the question: “Have we handed over the keys to the car of science to the machines?” One way to alleviate such concerns, he tells me, is to generate test data to see if an algorithm behaves as expected—as in the LHC Olympics. “Before you take a camera out and photograph the Loch Ness Monster, you want to make sure that it can reproduce a wide variety of colors” and patterns accurately, he says, so you can rely on it to capture whatever comes.

Galison, who is also a physicist, works on the Event Horizon Telescope, which images black holes. For that project, he remembers putting up utterly unexpected test images like Frosty the Snowman so that scientists could probe the system’s general ability to catch something new. “The danger is that you’ve missed out on some crucial test,” he says, “and that the object you’re going to be photographing is so different from your test patterns that you’re unprepared.”

The algorithms that physicists are using to seek new physics are certainly vulnerable to this danger. It helps that unsupervised learning is already being used in many applications. In industry, it’s surfacing anomalous credit-card transactions and hacked networks. In science, it’s identifying earthquake precursors, genome locations where proteins bind, and merging galaxies.

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But one difference with particle-physics data is that the anomalies may not be stand-alone objects or events. You’re looking not just for a needle in a haystack; you’re also looking for subtle irregularities in the haystack itself. Maybe a stack contains a few more short stems than you’d expect. Or a pattern reveals itself only when you simultaneously look at the size, shape, color, and texture of stems. Such a pattern might suggest an unacknowledged substance in the soil. In accelerator data, subtle patterns might suggest a hidden force. As Kasieczka and his colleagues write in one paper, “We are not looking for flying elephants, but instead a few extra elephants than usual at the local watering hole.”

Even algorithms that weigh many factors can miss signals—and they can also see spurious ones. The stakes of mistakenly claiming discovery are high. Going back to the hacking scenario, Plehn says, a company might ultimately determine that its network wasn’t hacked; it was just a new employee. The algorithm’s false positive causes little damage. “Whereas if you stand there and get the Nobel Prize, and a year later people say, ‘Well, it was a fluke,’ people would make fun of you for the rest of your life,” he says. In particle physics, he adds, you run the risk of spotting patterns purely by chance in big data, or as a result of malfunctioning equipment.

False alarms have happened before. In 1976, a group at Fermilab led by Leon Lederman, who later won a Nobel for other work, announced the discovery of a particle they tentatively called the Upsilon. The researchers calculated the probability of the signal’s happening by chance as 1 in 50. After further data collection, though, they walked back the discovery, calling the pseudo-particle the Oops-Leon. (Today, particle physicists wait until the chance that a finding is a fluke drops below 1 in 3.5 million, the so-called five-sigma criterion.) And in 2011, researchers at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment, in Italy, announced evidence for faster-than-light travel of neutrinos. Then, a few months later, they reported that the result was due to a faulty connection in their timing system.

Those cautionary tales linger in the minds of physicists. And yet, even while researchers are wary of false positives from AI, they also see it as a safeguard against them. So far, unsupervised learning has discovered no new physics, despite its use on data from multiple experiments at Fermilab and CERN. But anomaly detection may have prevented embarrassments like the one at OPERA. “So instead of telling you there’s a new physics particle,” Kasieczka says, “it’s telling you, this sensor is behaving weird today. You should restart it.”

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Hardware for AI-Assisted Particle Physics

Particle physicists are pushing the limits of not only their computing software but also their computing hardware. The challenge is unparalleled. The LHC produces 40 million particle collisions per second, each of which can produce a megabyte of data. That’s much too much information to store, even if you could save it to disk that quickly. So the two largest detectors each use two-level data filtering. The first layer, called the Level-1 Trigger, or L1T, harvests 100,000 events per second, and the second layer, called the High-Level Trigger, or HLT, plucks 1,000 of those events to save for later analysis. So only one in 40,000 events is ever potentially seen by human eyes.

Person with long blonde hair in a white shirt against a solid blue background.

Katya Govorkova

That’s when I thought, we need something like [AlphaGo] in physics. We need a genius that can look at the world differently.”

HLTs use central processing units (CPUs) like the ones in your desktop computer, running complex machine learning algorithms that analyze collisions based on the number, type, energy, momentum, and angles of the new particles produced. L1Ts, as a first line of defense, must be fast. So the L1Ts rely on integrated circuits called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which users can reprogram for specialized calculations.

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The trade-off is that the programming must be relatively simple. The FPGAs can’t easily store and run fancy neural networks; instead they follow scripted rules about, say, what features of a particle collision make it important. In terms of complexity level, it’s the instructions given to the women who scanned bubble chambers, not the women’s brains.

Ekaterina (Katya) Govorkova, a particle physicist at MIT, saw a path toward improving the LHC’s filters, inspired by a board game. Around 2020, she was looking for new physics by comparing precise measurements at the LHC with predictions, using little or no machine learning. Then she watched a documentary about AlphaGo, the program that used machine learning to beat a human Go champion. “For me the moment of realization was when AlphaGo would use some absolutely new type of strategy that humans, who played this game for centuries, hadn’t thought about before,” she says. “So that’s when I thought, we need something like that in physics. We need a genius that can look at the world differently.” New physics may be something we’d never imagine.

Govorkova and her collaborators found a way to compress autoencoders to put them on FPGAs, where they process an event every 80 nanoseconds (less than 10-millionth of a second). (Compression involved pruning some network connections and reducing the precision of some calculations.) They published their methods in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2022, and researchers are now using them during the LHC’s third run. The new trigger tech is installed in one of the detectors around the LHC’s giant ring, and it has found many anomalous events that would otherwise have gone unflagged.

Researchers are currently setting up analysis workflows to decipher why the events were deemed anomalous. Jennifer Ngadiuba, a particle physicist at Fermilab who is also one of the coordinators of the trigger system (and one of Govorkova’s coauthors), says that one feature stands out already: Flagged events have lots of jets of new particles shooting out of the collisions. But the scientists still need to explore other factors, like the new particles’ energies and their distributions in space. “It’s a high-dimensional problem,” she says.

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Eventually they will share the data openly, allowing others to eyeball the results or to apply new unsupervised learning algorithms in the hunt for patterns. Javier Duarte, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and also a coauthor on the 2022 paper, says, “It’s kind of exciting to think about providing this to the community of particle physicists and saying, like, ‘Shrug, we don’t know what this is. You can take a look.’” Duarte and Ngadiuba note that high-energy physics has traditionally followed a top-down approach to discovery, testing data against well-defined theories. Adding in this new bottom-up search for the unexpected marks a new paradigm. “And also a return of sorts to before the Standard Model was so well established,” Duarte adds.

Yet it could be years before we know why AI marked those collisions as anomalous. What conclusions could they support? “In the worst case, it could be some detector noise that we didn’t know about,” which would still be useful information, Ngadiuba says. “The best scenario could be a new particle. And then a new particle implies a new force.”

Person with braided updo in checkered suit jacket and chambray shirt, light blue background.

Jennifer Ngadiuba

“The best scenario could be a new particle. And then a new particle implies a new force.”

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Duarte says he expects their work with FPGAs to have wider applications. “The data rates and the constraints in high-energy physics are so extreme that people in industry aren’t necessarily working on this,” he says. “In self-driving cars, usually millisecond latencies are sufficient reaction times. But we’re developing algorithms that need to respond in microseconds or less. We’re at this technological frontier, and to see how much that can proliferate back to industry will be cool.”

Plehn is also working to put neural networks on FPGAs for triggers, in collaboration with experimentalists, electrical engineers, and other theorists. Encoding the nuances of abstract theories into material hardware is a puzzle. “In this grant proposal, the person I talked to most is the electrical engineer,” he says, “because I have to ask the engineer, which of my algorithms fits on your bloody FPGA?”

Hardware is hard, says Ryan Kastner, an electrical engineer and computer scientist at UC San Diego who works with Duarte on programming FPGAs. What allows the chips to run algorithms so quickly is their flexibility. Instead of programming them in an abstract coding language like Python, engineers configure the underlying circuitry. They map logic gates, route data paths, and synchronize operations by hand. That low-level control also makes the effort “painfully difficult,” Kastner says. “It’s kind of like you have a lot of rope, and it’s very easy to hang yourself.”

Seeking New Physics Among the Neutrinos

The next piece of new physics may not pop up at a particle accelerator. It may appear at a detector for neutrinos, particles that are part of the Standard Model but remain deeply mysterious. Neutrinos are tiny, electrically neutral, and so light that no one has yet measured their mass. (The latest attempt, in April, set an upper limit of about a millionth the mass of an electron.) Of all known particles with mass, neutrinos are the universe’s most abundant, but also among the most ghostly, rarely deigning to acknowledge the matter around them. Tens of trillions pass through your body every second.

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If we listen very closely, though, we may just hear the secrets they have to tell. Karagiorgi, of Columbia, has chosen this path to discovery. Being a physicist is “kind of like playing detective, but where you create your own mysteries,” she tells me during my visit to Columbia’s Nevis Laboratories, located on a large estate about 20 km north of Manhattan. Physics research began at the site after World War II; one hallway features papers going back to 1951.

A person stands inside a room that has gold-colored grids covering the floor, walls, and ceiling.

A researcher stands inside a prototype for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, which is designed to detect rare neutrino interactions.

CERN

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Karagiorgi is eagerly awaiting a massive neutrino detector that’s currently under construction. Starting in 2028, Fermilab will send neutrinos west through 1,300 km of rock to South Dakota, where they’ll occasionally make their existence known in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Why so far away? When neutrinos travel long distances, they have an odd habit of oscillating, transforming from one kind or “flavor” to another. Observing the oscillations of both the neutrinos and their mirror-image antiparticles, antineutrinos, could tell researchers something about the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry—which the Standard Model doesn’t explain—and thus, according to the Nevis website, “why we exist.”

“DUNE is the thing that’s been pushing me to develop these real-time AI methods,” Karagiorgi says, “for sifting through the data very, very, very quickly and trying to look for rare signatures of interest within them.” When neutrinos interact with the detector’s 70,000 tonnes of liquid argon, they’ll generate a shower of other particles, creating visual tracks that look like a photo of fireworks.

A simplified chart of the Standard Model of physics shows matter particles (quarks and leptons), force-carrying particles, and the Higgs, which conveys mass.

The Standard Model catalogs the known fundamental particles of matter and the forces that govern them, but leaves major mysteries unresolved.

Even when not bombarding DUNE with neutrinos, researchers will keep collecting data in the off chance that it captures neutrinos from a distant supernova. “This is a massive detector spewing out 5 terabytes of data per second,” Karagiorgi says, “and it’s going to run constantly for a decade.” They will need unsupervised learning to notice signatures that no one was looking for, because there are “lots of different models of how supernova explosions happen, and for all we know, none of them could be the right model for neutrinos,” she says. “To train your algorithm on such uncertain grounds is less than ideal. So an algorithm that can recognize any kind of disturbance would be a win.”

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Deciding in real time which 1 percent of 1 percent of data to keep will require FPGAs. Karagiorgi’s team is preparing to use them for DUNE, and she walks me to a computer lab where they program the circuits. In the FPGA lab, we look at nondescript circuit boards sitting on a table. “So what we’re proposing is a scheme where you can have something like a hundred of these boards for DUNE deep underground that receive the image data frame by frame,” she says. This system could tell researchers whether a given frame resembled TV static, fireworks, or something in between.

Neutrino experiments, like many particle-physics studies, are very visual. When Karagiorgi was a postdoc, automated image processing at neutrino detectors was still in its infancy, so she and collaborators would often resort to visual scanning (bubble-chamber style) to measure particle tracks. She still asks undergrads to hand-scan as an educational exercise. “I think it’s wrong to just send them to write a machine learning algorithm. Unless you can actually visualize the data, you don’t really gain a sense of what you’re looking for,” she says. “I think it also helps with creativity to be able to visualize the different types of interactions that are happening, and see what’s normal and what’s not normal.”

Back in Karagiorgi’s office, a bulletin board displays images from The Cognitive Art of Feynman Diagrams, an exhibit for which the designer Edward Tufte created wire sculptures of the physicist Richard Feynman’s schematics of particle interactions. “It’s funny, you know,” she says. “They look like they’re just scribbles, right? But actually, they encode quantitatively predictive behavior in nature.” Later, Karagiorgi and I spend a good 10 minutes discussing whether a computer or a human could find Waldo without knowing what Waldo looked like. We also touch on the 1964 Supreme Court case in which Justice Potter Stewart famously declined to define obscenity, saying “I know it when I see it.” I ask whether it seems weird to hand over to a machine the task of deciding what’s visually interesting. “There are a lot of trust issues,” she says with a laugh.

On the drive back to Manhattan, we discuss the history of scientific discovery. “I think it’s part of human nature to try to make sense of an orderly world around you,” Karagiorgi says. “And then you just automatically pick out the oddities. Some people obsess about the oddities more than others, and then try to understand them.”

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Reflecting on the Standard Model, she called it “beautiful and elegant,” with “amazing predictive power.” Yet she finds it both limited and limiting, blinding us to colors we don’t yet see. “Sometimes it’s both a blessing and a curse that we’ve managed to develop such a successful theory.”

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The 5 Best Windshield Wipers, According To The Experts

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Ensuring that your vehicle is running efficiently and safely is a non-stop task that involves a veritable laundry list of vital tasks that automotive pros label as “routine maintenance.” That list, of course, includes things like regular oil and filter changes and tire inspections. But when it comes to ensuring your safety while driving in inclement weather, having quality windshield wipers is vital. After all, driving in such conditions with wipers that fail to remove rain, fog, and snow from your windshield is not only frustrating but also dangerous for you and every other driver on the road.

Even as important as it is to select the best wipers for your vehicle, the process of doing so can be particularly difficult, as there’s no shortage of options in the windshield wiper market. Cost and effectiveness will factor heavily in the decision-making process for most drivers. But those in the market for new wipers will also be looking to procure windshield wipers that are durable and easy to install. According to a few trusted automotive experts, these wipers should satisfy on all of those particular fronts. 

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Rain-X Latitude 2-In-1 Water Repellent Wiper Blades

It seems fitting that we start this list with a windshield wiper blade that topped Car and Driver’s recent list of the best on the market. Not surprisingly, those wiper blades are made by one of the most prominent names in the market, Rain-X. If you’re familiar with the Rain-X brand, you know that limiting moisture is its primary focus. And according to Car and Driver, Rain-X’s Latitude Water Repellent blades are the best you can buy.

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Just for the record, we also ranked the Rain-X brand high on our list of the best wiper blades. According to the Car and Driver rankings, the hydrophobic coating on the brand’s Latitude Water Repellent Wiper Blades — which is applied as they wipe — makes them particularly effective in repelling moisture from your windshield even while they’re not in action. Meanwhile, the blades themselves immediately improved visibility when subjected to Car and Driver’s testing. They were also deemed noticeably quiet when pressed into action, with Car and Driver further reporting zero streaking during use.

Car and Driver did, however, note that the blade’s locking clasp mechanism can make them difficult to remove and swap out. Nonetheless, the wipers are among the more budget-friendly listed, with Rain-X typically selling a two-pack on Amazon for $34 (depending on size). 

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Bosch Icon

Folks who instead look to Road & Track for their automotive news might be quick to tell you that publication deemed a set made by Bosch may provide the best bang for your rain-removing buck. We should note, however, that Bosch’s Icon Beam Wiper Blades will actually cost you quite a bit more than the Rain-X option. The German company — who also makes well-regarded power tools — selling them for $54 a pair on Amazon.

We should, perhaps, also note that these blades are rated a little better than the Rain-X wipers by Amazon shoppers, who’ve rated them at 4.6 stars to the latter’s 4.3 stars. But since we’re focusing on the expert opinion here, we’ll keep the focus on Road & Track’s assessment of the Bosch blades. And according to that publication, the minimalist-designed Icon Beam Blades are well-made and easy to install.

Most importantly, Road & Track claims these blades are effective at combating the elements in inclement weather due to the design that fits them snugly onto the windshield. This ensures the blades are applying even, end-to-end pressure on the glass with each swipe back and forth. Road & Track notes that the design leaves little room for streaking even in heavier weather events and produces little to no juddering. Still, the publication also claims they may need a little extra attention in ice and snow.

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PIAA Si-Tech Silicone

Those first two windshield wiper blades provide consumers in need with options that can be purchased at a reasonable-enough price point. But if money is not your primary point of concern when it comes to upgrading the wiper blades on your vehicle, Road & Track believes that PIAA’s Si-Tech Silicon Wiper Blades are well worth a look.

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Make no mistake, these wiper blades are quite pricey, with PIAA currently listing the Si-Tech Silicone Wiper Blade at a per-blade rate of $45 through its Amazon storefront. But even at roughly $90 a pair (depending on car model), Road & Track claims they may be worth the investment. Not only does the publication say that the silicon design outperformed most of the rubber-based blades it tested in terms of streak-free wiping and noise production, but it also notes the aerodynamic, low-profile look makes them easy on the eyes. The design also makes them more resistant to airflow, ensuring steadier contact with the windshield when driving in the rain. 

As impressed as Road & Track was with the wiper blades, even that publication notes that the installation process is trickier than with most other brands tested. YouTuber Eddie M Cars seemingly backs up that claim in their own positive review. By most accounts, the silicon design may also make these pricey PIAA more resistant to wear and tear than your standard rubber build. That means they may, ultimately, save you a buck or two over budget brands that tend to require more frequent replacing.  

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Aero Voyager

If you’re not willing to pony up for those fancy silicon PIAA wiper blades, Car and Driver would have you believe that the Aero Voyager is one of the better budget-conscious options you’ll find. That’s even more true of the Voyager, as the publication points out that this model actually comes with extra rubber refills in the box. That option essentially extends the lifetime of the wipers via an easy, money-saving replacement process. On top of that, the Aero Voyagers are being sold at a cost of just $17 for a pair on Amazon, making them the cheapest option on this list. But there is a cost to pay with that low sticker price, as Car and Driver claims that you may see some noticeable streaking even with a new pair of these wiper blades, particularly with drier wipes.

For the record, the auto experts at GearJunkie noted the same dry-wiping issue in its Best Wiper ranking, where the Aero Voyagers also took the Best Budget option crown. Apart from the dry wipe issue, both factions note that wipers still provide exceptional function at the price point and are far quieter than you might expect for a budget brand. They also state that the Voyagers are easy to install for most J-hook setups, with GearJunkie also noting that their Teflon coating increases both their wiping ability and their durability. At $17 for a pair, these are the sort of features that should intrigue anyone looking for new wiper blades.

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AutoBoo Quiet Windshield Wiper Blades

We’d wager that most of you are already aware of the windshield wiper manufacturers we’ve already listed, as they are regular fixtures on the shelves of automotive and big box retailers. To that end, you’re likely not surprised to see their blades topping best of lists assembled by automotive experts. But we’d also wager that neither of those things is true when it comes to the AutoBoo brand, even as Road & Track recently deemed its Quiet Windshield Wiper blades the best value on the market. 

As far as pricing goes, the AutoBoo brand typically lists a pair of the Road & Track approved blades for just under $20 through Amazon. That price should be enticing enough for a pair of new wiper blades, particularly ones that are well-rated by automotive professionals and even garage-dwelling TikTokers like @life.full.of.mac

It should be noted that even positive reviewers claim that the AutoBoo wipers may not match up to blades from the more expensive major brands in terms of overall construction and extreme weather performance. But most reviews also claim that the blades feel like they consistently over-perform compared to other budget brands that cost more. Moreover, Road & Track deemed these blades very easy to install, claiming they went on with less effort than any other brand it tested. With that, they rated well in terms of noise and streak free operation in moderate weather tests.  

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How we got here

The purpose of this article is to highlight a few of the windshield wipers on the market that have been deemed the best available by legitimate automotive experts. In assembling this list, we sought out reviews by trusted automotive sites like those cited above, and selected a few of the options they reviewed positively, accounting for additional factors like ease of installation and price point. Whenever appropriate, reviews from those auto professionals were cited directly to ensure accuracy.

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How Consultants Use AI to Enhance Salesforce Performance

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Artificial intelligence remains at the center of every business conversation. This year leading players in the IT space have unveiled major initiatives that are aimed at hastening the adoption of generative AI applications. These developments have led to the widespread interest among organizations willing to harness the power of AI for driving innovation, and revenue growth—both beyond, as well as the Salesforce ecosystem. As AI continues to reshape industries, organizations face the challenge of integrating it into their already existing systems. 

Over the years, Salesforce has invested significantly in AI through Einstein GPT and other generative AI features. These advancements have enabled businesses to transform their CRM into a smart and highly personalized platform. This is where the need for Salesforce consultants arises. These consultants assist businesses leverage the actual potential of AI through their technical capabilities and strategic approach.

What does the Integration of AI and Salesforce Hold for Organizations?

Salesforce AI besides automating tasks enables organizations to draw smart insights, predict future outcomes, and more. With tools such as generative AI and Einstein, organizations can scrutinize previous data, anticipate customer behavior, offer tailored suggestions, and much more.

  • Data Readiness: AI sustains on clear, precise and structured data. 
  • Integration complexity: Aligning AI with pre-existing systems and processes calls for careful planning. 
  • User adoption: Teams require training to develop trust in AI-driven insights. 
  • Customization: Prebuilt AI features mostly need to be tailored to suit the unique requirements of a business.

What are the Advantages of Partnering with one of the Best Salesforce Consulting Partner?

Enabling Smarter Sales with AI: One of the best way experts use AI is optimizing sales performance. This helps teams to work smarter rather than harder. By applying Einstein Lead Scoring, consultants enable sales reps to offer priority to high-value opportunities by assessing historical sales data and figuring out conversion patterns. AI predicts the chances of deal-closure and suggests next steps via opportunity insights. This provides sales reps with the clear visibility into channel health, as well as the ability to make data-oriented decisions. Furthermore, consultants also configure tailored recommendation engines that suggest upsell and cross-sell opportunities aligned with the client needs. This drives revenue growth and augments customer relationships.

Optimizing Customer Service: Customer service is an area where consultants unlock the utmost potential of AI. With customer expectations reaching an all-time high, AI-enabled service has become an actual distinguisher for organizations struggling to deliver seamless experiences. Within Salesforce Service Cloud, consultants implement Einstein Bots to manage routine queries. By creating, installing, and training these bots, they allow organizations to provide prompt responses while enabling human agents to focus on intricate cases. Consultants also deploy intelligent case routing, where AI, by default, assigns issues to the most suitable agent based on expertise, capacity, and urgency. This not just hastens resolution times but also ensures customers receive the right support from the start. Additionally, consultants also empower businesses to harness sentiment analysis, which assesses the emotion behind client interactions across multiple channels. These insights empower organizations to take hands-on action—resolving possible issues before they escalate. This helps uncover opportunities to fortify customer loyalty.

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Generative AI for Optimizing Marketing: Generative AI for Optimizing Marketing: Marketing is another area where generative AI is transforming how businesses associate with their audiences. By integrating AI within Marketing Cloud, consultants enable companies to design campaigns that are data-driven, as well as intensely personalized at scale. By creating ad copies, social media posts and more, Generative AI boosts customer engagement. These outputs are fine-tuned by experts to ensure they align with the brand voice of a company besides following regulatory guidelines. AI also assesses customer data to recognize micro-segments with shared behaviors. This enables consultants to design campaigns that align with specific groups. They also utilize AI-powered journey builders to anticipate the best channel, effectiveness, and messaging for customer engagement. This ensures every interaction seems relevant. By configuring and testing these AI-driven journeys, consultants empower organizations to make the most of marketing ROI while creating experiences that fortify customer relationships.

AI Analytics for Driving Data-powered Decisions: One of the greatest potential of Salesforce AI is its ability to transform raw data into actionable intelligence. However, organizations fail to draw value from these capabilities in the absence of a right setup. By using predictive analytics, consultants create AI models that predict outcomes. This empowers them to make smart decisions. By creating dashboards that update in real time, they manage the reporting process. This decreases the load of reporting manually while offering an explicit picture of performance metrics. Additionally, consultants also configure tools for detecting anomaly. These tools identify irregular patterns such as unanticipated hike in service requests and more, which empower businesses to reply proactively and address potential issues before they intensify. 

Streamlining Operations: AI in Salesforce isn’t limited to service, sales and marketing. It plays a vital role in augmenting efficiency. By harnessing workflow automation, consultants can configure AI to manage repetitive tasks. This not only eliminates errors but also leaves teams with sufficient time to lay emphasis on strategic tasks. AI also enables smarter optimization of resources by assessing performance data to ensure effective allocation of resources.

Adoption and Change Management: Ensuring successful adoption and effective change management is just as important as implementing advanced AI features. Salesforce consultants emphasize on driving adoption through all-inclusive training and enablement programs. They also identify that introducing AI mostly involves cultural shifts, as employees may resist altering established routines or may face job dislodgment. To address this, consultants pave the way for structured change management initiatives designed to ease transitions and encourage acceptance. needs.

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Final Words:

AI is no longer a future-ready concept, it has become a driver of competitive edge. For organizations leveraging Salesforce, the real challenge is not deciding whether to adopt AI but determining how to implement it effectively. As a reputed Salesforce implementation partner, Girikon serves as the critical link between technology and business outcomes to ensure that AI isn’t just installed but also integrated into day-to-day workflows, adopted by teams, and aligned with long-term goals. The result is a faster, and more customer-oriented organization. Businesses that align the power of Salesforce with AI along with the expertise of an appropriate implementation partner are well-positioned for success. 

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Car Alternator Gets Repurposed Into Hydroelectric Generator

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Car Alternator Hydroelectric Generator Rewind
A car alternator will normally charge a battery at 14 volts while the engine is operating. One inventive maker had an epiphany: the same technology might be adapted to do a lot more when connected to running water. John from FarmCraft101 wanted to try his hand at repurposing a conventional car alternator. He disassembled the stator and manually rewound each coil to boost the output to 200 volts, or more if possible. As a result, the technology now powers a piece of his workplace from a pond hundreds of feet away, cutting line losses that would otherwise kill a standard 12-volt system.



Most standard alternators have three-phase AC inside them, but before it is converted to DC, a rectifier inside the alternator is utilized, and a regulator maintains the voltage at a controlled level, roughly 14 volts. We are left with a bare three-phase generator with all other parts removed. The rotor stays as an electromagnet with all parts powered by a small DC supply. When the rotation starts, a current flows through the stator windings. In most alternators, thick wire with a small number of turns per coil is utilized to create a lot of current with low voltage, but John has chosen to use the opposite.


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He started with a cheap GM CS130 alternator, which he bought online for pennies. The disassembly was straightforward, but once he got to the stator, everything fell apart. The original windings were stuck in a thick layer of varnish and epoxy, and he put the stator in a toaster oven and used a paint remover to remove the original coils. After that, it was just a matter of prying and cutting them out, which took hours.

Car Alternator Hydroelectric Generator
The clean slots were then coated using Nomex paper strips to act as insulators. John then made new coils for each phase using wooden forms and 22-gauge copper wire coated with enamel. The new coils had 30 turns each, unlike the original coils, which had a constant 4 or 8 turns per coil. He made 12 coils per phase, and each phase had 36 slots. Additionally, he made the phases 120 degrees apart to ensure a complete balance in the three-phase current. To do this, he alternated the direction of the coils, causing the north and south poles of the rotor to induce the required current flow.

Once all the coils were installed inside the stator, he made sure to space them out in layers, held securely in place with small 3D printed PETG pieces that simply snap over the holes. Once all three phases were filled in, he connected them up in a star (wye) configuration to increase the line-to-line voltage output rather than trying to increase the current output to its fullest extent with a delta configuration. The reading of three ohms per phase confirmed that the lower gauge wire he had chosen would indeed sacrifice a little current for a lot more voltage.

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Car Alternator Hydroelectric Generator
Reassembly restored the rotor brushes, at least for the time being, but he neglected the internal diodes and regulator, intending to compensate by utilizing an external bridge rectifier to convert the three-phase AC to DC. Bench experiments were conducted with an old drill and, later, a geared grinder to spin the shaft up to speed. When the drill got the shaft up to around 1500 RPM, the voltage was around 100 volts with the multimeter set to open circuit mode. Then, as he cranked it up to around 290 volts with the grinder, it became evident that it had a lot of potential. Adding a load of resistors to replicate real-world use, the device produced an astonishing 700 watts. Of course, the voltage sagged slightly under load, but even unloaded, it produced significantly more power than a typical alternator.

John hopes to get roughly 240 volts out of this contraption, which should be enough to power his hydro application as long as the pond turbine spins the alternator at a reasonable rate via the belts. He’ll definitely need to perform some pulley sizing to bring it up to a nice stable 3000 RPM for optimal power. Yes, more voltage implies lower current in the long run to the shop, so he can use thinner, cheaper wire and still transport the same power without wasting it on losses or sagging too far in the first place. He eventually intends to replace the magnetic rotor with neodymium permanent magnets, which will eliminate the need for brushes, excitation power, and other unnecessary complexity.
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OpenClaw AI assistant suddenly under fire as hackers exploit skills and extensions to steal data from users everywhere

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  • OpenClaw skills execute locally, giving attackers direct access to sensitive files
  • Malicious crypto-themed skills rely on social engineering to trick unsuspecting users
  • Users running unverified commands increase exposure to ransomware and malicious scripts

OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, is an AI assistant designed to execute tasks on behalf of users.

Agent-style AI tools such as OpenClaw are increasingly popular for automating workflows and interacting with local systems, enabling users to run commands, access files, and manage processes more efficiently.

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Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI deal has seemingly vanished

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A Wall Street Journal report on Friday said Nvidia insiders had expressed doubts about the transaction and that Huang had privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach. The Journal also reported that Huang had expressed concern about the competition OpenAI faces from Google and Anthropic. Huang called those claims “nonsense.”

Nvidia shares fell about 1.1 percent on Monday following the reports. Sarah Kunst, managing director at Cleo Capital, told CNBC that the back-and-forth was unusual. “One of the things I did notice about Jensen Huang is that there wasn’t a strong ‘It will be $100 billion.’ It was, ‘It will be big. It will be our biggest investment ever.’ And so I do think there are some question marks there.”

In September, Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, noted the circular nature of such investments to CNBC. “Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia,” Talkington said. “I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen.”

Tech critic Ed Zitron has been critical of Nvidia’s circular investments for some time, which touch dozens of tech companies, including major players and startups. They are also all Nvidia customers.

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“NVIDIA seeds companies and gives them the guaranteed contracts necessary to raise debt to buy GPUs from NVIDIA,” Zitron wrote on Bluesky last September, “Even though these companies are horribly unprofitable and will eventually die from a lack of any real demand.”

Chips from other places

Outside of sourcing GPUs from Nvidia, OpenAI has reportedly discussed working with startups Cerebras and Groq, both of which build chips designed to reduce inference latency. But in December, Nvidia struck a $20 billion licensing deal with Groq, which Reuters sources say ended OpenAI’s talks with Groq. Nvidia hired Groq’s founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with other senior leaders as part of the arrangement.

In January, OpenAI announced a $10 billion deal with Cerebras instead, adding 750 megawatts of computing capacity for faster inference through 2028. Sachin Katti, who joined OpenAI from Intel in November to lead compute infrastructure, said the partnership adds “a dedicated low-latency inference solution” to OpenAI’s platform.

But OpenAI has clearly been hedging its bets. Beyond the Cerebras deal, the company struck an agreement with AMD in October for six gigawatts of GPUs and announced plans with Broadcom to develop a custom AI chip to wean itself off of Nvidia dependence. When those chips will be ready, however, is currently unknown.

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AEKE K1 is a smart home gym that evolves with your family

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Let’s be honest: trying to get an entire household to agree on a fitness routine is usually a recipe for disaster. It often feels like trying to solve a puzzle where the pieces keep changing shape. You have adults balancing the stress of work and the exhaustion of parenting, kids who are glued to their screens, and grandparents who need something gentle but effective. Everyone has a different schedule, a different body type, and a drastically different idea of what “fun” looks like.

For years, the “home gym” solution to this problem was to buy a treadmill that eventually turned into an expensive clothes hanger, or a set of dumbbells that gathered dust in the corner because only one person knew how to use them properly. Most equipment is built for a solitary user with a specific goal, not a chaotic, multi-generational family.

This is exactly where the AEKE K1 Smart Home Gym is trying to change the narrative. It isn’t just another piece of heavy metal to stub your toe on; it is designed to be a chameleon that adapts to whoever is standing in front of it.

The “Brain” Behind the Brawn

At first glance, the K1 looks like a sleek mirror or a piece of modern tech, but the real magic is what is happening inside. It ditches the clunky iron plates for AI-controlled digital resistance. This is a game-changer for a shared space. It means the machine can generate up to 220 pounds of resistance for a heavy strength session, but instantly dial it back for a mobility workout, all without anyone having to manually move a pin or swap a weight.

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The system uses what they call a “6D fitness analysis,” which sounds technical, but in practice, it acts like a vigilant spotter. It watches your movement in real-time. If your form gets sloppy during a squat, it knows. If you are favoring one side, it catches it. This allows it to offer corrections instantly, which is crucial when you don’t have a human trainer in the room to stop you from hurting yourself.

A Gym That Knows You

The biggest friction point in family fitness is setup time. Nobody wants to spend ten minutes adjusting seat heights and weight stacks. The K1 solves this with individual user profiles. When you step up, it remembers you. It knows that you are working on hypertrophy, and it knows that your partner is focused on cardio. It switches modes instantly, so a teenager can jump on for a quick 15-minute game after school, and a parent can do a serious lift after dinner, with zero reconfiguration required.

Turning Sweat into Play

Speaking of teenagers, the K1 pulls a clever trick to get people moving: it gamifies the experience. Staring at a wall while lifting weights is boring. Staring at a vibrant 43-inch 4K screen while chasing high scores in a fitness game is actually fun.

By blending movement with entertainment, it stops exercise from feeling like a chore. The built-in sound system immerses you in the experience, whether that is a high-energy game for the kids or a guided session for the adults. It turns the “fitness corner” into a place people actually want to hang out.

Safety and Practicality

For a family device, safety is non-negotiable. Because the weight is digital, the K1 can instantly cut the resistance if it detects you are struggling or in danger. It’s a safety net that iron weights simply can’t offer. Plus, it respects your living space. When you are done, it folds down to take up barely any room – about 0.3 square meters – blending back into your home decor rather than dominating it.

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Perhaps the most refreshing part? It breaks the modern trend of endless subscriptions. The K1 offers a lifetime experience without the monthly fees that usually plague smart fitness gear. It’s a solution designed for the reality of modern homes: flexible, safe, engaging, and genuinely built for everyone.

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I’ve Tried Dozens of Cordless Vacuums — Dyson’s PencilVac Is the Sleekest Yet

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Cordless vacuums are lighter than upright or corded vacuums but still have heavyweight cleaning power. Some of the best cordless vacuums I’ve tested come from Dyson. The company features prominently on our list of the best cordless vacuums, earning spots for dust-busting and wet-dry mopping, even though its models tend to be on the pricier side. 

Dyson’s new PencilVac, now available for sale in the US, is different. As the name suggests, the PencilVac is shaped a lot like a pencil. It felt more like holding a broom than a vacuum. It’s also the lightest and thinnest cordless vacuum I’ve ever used, measuring just 38 millimeters in diameter and weighing less than 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms). The entire motor (a Hyperdymium 140k motor) is somehow small enough to fit into the handle, which isn’t any bigger than the rest of the vacuum. 

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A person holds up the handle of the Dyson PencilVac to show how narrow it is.

The PencilVac is just 38mm in diameter, including the motor that fits the handle.

Ajay Kumar

While cordless vacuums are easier to maneuver than corded ones, they can be notably top-heavy, with some as heavy as 12 pounds, and even the lighter ones usually weigh around 6 or 7 pounds. 

Watch this: I Spoke with James Dyson About Product Design and the Lightest and Thinnest Vacuum on the Market

Key specs: 

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  • 38mm diameter and weighs less than 4 pounds (1.8kg) 
  • Four conical Fluffycones cleaner heads that can detangle long hair 
  • Dyson Hyperdymium 140k motor, 34% more power dense with 55 air watts of suction 
  • A dust separation system can capture 99.99% of particles as small as 0.3 microns 
  • Dust compression system to compress dust in a 0.08-liter dustbin
  • Connects to the MyDyson app to monitor battery and filter maintenance 
  • Dust illuminating green LEDs on both sides 
  • 60-minute replaceable battery pack 
  • Magnetic charging dock with tool storage
A close-up of the vacuum working shows LED lights on both the front and back of the vacuum.

Dual green LED lights help you find dust.

Ajay Kumar

Using the PencilVac

Swiping the brush head rollers around the wood floor in Dyson’s showroom took minimal effort, and part of that comes from the brush head design. Rather than the standard single or dual brush roller, the PencilVac has four conical brush bars (in an array of two on each side). They’re designed to eject hair as it’s picked up and prevent it from wrapping around and tangling the brush bars. The front bar rotates in one direction while the rear ones rotate in the opposite direction, in theory making cleaning more comprehensive.

A close-up of a a person standing behind the vacuum.

The PencilVac has four rollers on its brush head.

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Ajay Kumar

The dustbin fills up quickly, but it’s easy to empty 

I briefly used the vacuum in Dyson’s showroom to clean up biscuit crumbs from the floor. The green LED lights are a feature you’ll find on the Dyson V15 Detect as well, and they make it easy to see dust and other debris. The mess was clean in a few swipes, with the dustbin successfully compacting the crumbs into a tightly packed mass. It was fascinating to see all the dirt collecting right at the top of the dustbin. Dyson claims that despite only having a 0.08-liter capacity, the new dustbin design can pack five times the dust and debris into the same space. 

A close-up of the very small and narrow dust collection container on the Dyson PencilVac.

The dust gets compacted into a tightly packed mass, saving you space.

Ajay Kumar

That might be true, but I noticed that the dustbin filled up quickly and required immediate emptying between each demonstration. For reference, the average size of a dustbin on a cordless vacuum is usually between 0.5 liters on the small end and as much as one liter on the bigger end. 

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I just don’t see the PencilVac being a main vacuum for people in big households with pets and kids, though it can make a nice supplement to a more mainstream vacuum since it’s so light and easy to use. 

Eject the vacuum like a syringe 

A close-up shows the vacuuming being emptied over a trash can.

Emptying the PencilVac ejects the dust and debris like a plunger or syringe.

Ajay Kumar

On the plus side, emptying the dustbin is easy with a unique plunger-style ejection system that allows you to eject dust directly into the trash without needing to shake out or tap the dustbin. A few tools are included, like the combi-crevice and conical hair screw tool, and may lend it more to light cleaning tasks, by helping you get into tight spaces and awkward gaps and pull out hair from carpets, sofas and mattresses. 

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The PencilVac comes with a magnetic charging dock, but unlike some competitors like the Shark Clean & Empty, it won’t self-empty. This is also Dyson’s first connected vacuum, allowing you to pair it with the MyDyson app to monitor things like battery life and filter maintenance. 

A close-up of the rollers being ejected from the Dyson PencilVac.

The rollers are designed to eject hair to avoid tangling.

Ajay Kumar

Price and availability 

The Dyson PencilVac is available in the US via Dyson for $599. The price makes it less expensive than the top-tier models of Dyson’s lineup, like the $850 Dyson V15 Detect Absolute and $1,150 Gen5 Outsize (at full price), but more costly than many of our top picks for cordless vacuums like the $180 Eureka ReactiSense 440. I’m looking forward to testing it in our Louisville lab to see how it compares to other thin and lightweight options as well as beefier models in cleaning performance.  

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The superb Dreame L10s Ultra robovac is back to its lowest price of AU$429, matching Black Friday

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The Dreame L10s Ultra robot vacuum and mop has been discounted to match the all-time low price of AU$429 that we saw from Black Friday 2025.

While the advertised RRP on Amazon is AU$1,199, the L10s Ultra was originally priced at AU$2,588 when it launched in 2022. But thanks to new iterations of this robovac coming out in quick succession (the latest Gen 3 model was released in October 2025), the L10s Ultra is now selling for a fraction of that original price.

In our Dreame L10s Ultra review, the robovac impressed with its AI obstacle avoidance capability and ability to detect changes in floor type and switch cleaning modes from carpet to hard flooring automatically. It also doesn’t need to map the space it will be cleaning beforehand, navigating a home on its own without issues.

The self-emptying capabilities were praised, as well as the ability to control the robovac remotely while it’s in standby mode. Our reviewer added that the companion app was easy-to use, where you can view cleaning history, set scheduled cleanups, tweak the carpet cleaning settings and see the accessory use, among other useful features.

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Gen 3 model mentioned above has also been discounted, and boasts 25,000 Pa units compared to the Gen 1’s 5,300 Pa. That said, it will still cost you twice as much as the L10s Ultra at AU$1,049.50, even with the 50% discount applied at checkout.

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Technologies That Drive Operational Efficiency

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Running a business means juggling countless moving parts while trying to stay ahead of the competition. You know that feeling when manual processes eat up your day, communication breaks down between teams, and you’re constantly putting out fires instead of focusing on growth. The good news is that modern technology has solutions that can transform these daily headaches into streamlined operations.

Let’s explore how specific technologies can drive operational efficiency and revolutionize the way you run your business, turning chaos into competitive advantage.

Cloud Computing: Your Data Liberation Story

Remember the days when accessing important files meant being chained to your office computer? You’d arrive early, stay late, and still feel like you were missing critical information when working remotely. Server crashes could bring your entire operation to a halt, and your IT costs seemed to climb every month.

Cloud computing changes this narrative completely. Your team can access files, applications, and data from anywhere with an Internet connection. Collaboration happens in real time, whether your employees are in the office, working from home, or traveling. When your systems live in the cloud, automatic backups protect your data, and you only pay for the resources you actually use.

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All you have to do is choose the right cloud provider and migration strategy. Start by identifying which applications and data would benefit most from cloud access, then work with a trusted provider to create a migration plan that minimizes disruption to your operations.

Artificial Intelligence: From Guesswork to Precision

Decision-making used to rely heavily on gut instinct and incomplete information. You’d spend hours analyzing spreadsheets, trying to spot trends, and making educated guesses about inventory needs, customer behavior, and market opportunities. Important insights often remained hidden in your data, and by the time you discovered them, competitors had already moved ahead.

Nowadays, there are hundreds of technologies and devices built precisely to streamline and improve decision-making, but few are as powerful and accessible as artificial intelligence. AI uses machine learning algorithms to analyze patterns in your data that your eyes could miss, predict customer needs before they express them, and automate routine decisions that once consumed hours of your time. Your inventory management becomes precise, customer service becomes proactive, and marketing campaigns target the right people at the right moment.

Making this transformation requires starting small and scaling up. Identify one specific business challenge where AI could make an immediate impact—perhaps customer service chatbots or predictive maintenance—and build from there.

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Internet of Things (IoT): Turning Equipment Into Intelligence

Do you have equipment that is silent until something goes wrong? Maybe your machines break down without warning, causing costly downtime and emergency repairs. Or maybe you discover problems only after they’d already damaged productivity, frustrated customers, or created safety hazards. Perhaps your maintenance schedules are based on calendar dates rather than actual equipment conditions.

IoT sensors change everything by giving your equipment a voice. These smart devices monitor temperature, vibration, performance metrics, and wear patterns continuously. They alert you to potential problems before they become failures, optimize energy usage automatically, and provide data that helps you make informed decisions about replacements and upgrades.

The path to IoT implementation starts with identifying your most critical equipment and processes. Install sensors on machines that cause the biggest disruption when they fail, then expand your network as you see results and build confidence in the technology.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Your Digital Workforce

Repetitive tasks can drain your team’s energy and creativity. Employees spend countless hours on data entry, invoice processing, report generation, and other routine activities that add little value but consume significant time. These manual processes are prone to errors, create bottlenecks, and prevent your people from focusing on strategic work that drives growth.

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RPA creates a digital workforce that handles these routine tasks with perfect accuracy and unlimited stamina. Software robots can process invoices, update databases, generate reports, and handle customer inquiries around the clock. Your employees then become free to focus on creativity, problem-solving, and building relationships that truly matter to your business.

Implementing RPA starts with documenting your current processes and identifying the most repetitive, rule-based tasks. Begin with one straightforward process, perfect the automation, then expand to other areas where digital workers can create value.

Advanced Security Systems: From Reactive to Proactive Protection

Security used to be not much more than a door lock and a key. Business owners used to have to hope that nothing bad would happen when they left for the night. Nowadays, physical security has made huge advancements in hardware that make it harder than ever for intruders to gain access. You probably have at least durable deadbolts on your physical business, but that’s not a foolproof strategy. You might still worry about unauthorized access to physical locations and wonder if your digital systems are truly protected.

Technology has filled in the security gaps that hardware can’t fill. Modern security systems create a proactive shield around your operations. For example, you can choose from different types of access control cards to integrate the intelligence of software with the physical benefits of locked hardware. You can also install smart cameras with facial recognition and AI-powered threat detection that work together to identify and respond to security issues before they escalate. These systems learn normal patterns and immediately flag anything unusual, giving you peace of mind and protecting your assets 24/7.

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Building comprehensive security starts with assessing your current vulnerabilities across both physical and digital assets. Work with security professionals to design integrated systems that protect your specific business needs without creating barriers for legitimate users.

Making Technology Work for Your Business

You’re fortunate enough to own a business in an age that gives you access to hundreds of technologies that drive operational efficiency. This blog has covered only a few. The key to leveraging these technologies lies in understanding that they’re tools designed to solve specific business problems, not flashy additions to impress others. Start by identifying your biggest operational pain points, then explore which technologies offer the most practical solutions.

Success comes from taking a measured approach. Choose one technology that addresses your most pressing challenge, implement it thoroughly, and measure the results before moving to the next innovation. This strategy builds confidence in your team, demonstrates clear value to stakeholders, and creates a foundation for continued technological advancement.

Act as if your competitors are already exploring these possibilities (because they probably are). The question isn’t whether technology will transform business operations—it’s whether you’ll lead that transformation or be forced to catch up later. 

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Google Home Finally Adds Support For Buttons

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Home users, your long nightmare is over. The platform has finally added support for buttons. The release notes for a February 2 update state that several new starter conditions for automations are now available, including “Switch or button pressed.”

Smart buttons are physical, programmable switches that you can press to trigger automations or control devices in your smart home, such as turning lights on or off, opening and closing shades, running a Good Night scene, or starting a robot vacuum. A great alternative to voice and app control when you want to control multiple devices, smart buttons are often wireless and generally have several ways to press them: single press, double press, and long press, meaning one button can do multiple things.

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