Yang Yang

Light passing through a thin glass fiber scatters into countless tiny speckles, like ripples on water from a thrown stone. Physicists call this graininess speckle noise. Because of it, images from an ultra-thin endoscope come out blurry, as if you're looking through fogged-up glass. The researchers devised a program that removes this ripple.

52.4 nDCG@10—that's the result ModernBERT achieves after Vocabulary Transfer. Just yesterday it stumbled over letter case, and today it outranks the best sparse retrievers. A neural network flunks search because it can't agree on words. 'Token' and 'token' are two distinct universes to it.

A thin film of zirconium nitride lies on a magnesium oxide substrate. Its thickness is two-tenths of a micron, like a spider's web, but inside it quantum life is boiling. When cooled to half a kelvin, superconductivity does not disappear all at once: it breaks up into rare islands that still hold on amid the disorder.