Week of October 26, 2026
2026-W44: 20 curated papers with 20 free plain-English explainers.
Start with #1 → OpenTac: An Open Ecosystem for Customizable, Scalable, and Transferable 3D Tactile Sensing
OpenTac: An Open Ecosystem for Customizable, Scalable, and Transferable 3D Tactile Sensing
A customizable tactile skin reads shear and normal force, and a design tool stamps sensors from outlines, surfaces, or a sentence.
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Screening strongly correlated materials in solid oxide cells with quantum simulation
A materials-to-money map asks whether quantum solvers can screen oxygen electrodes for solid oxide cells, and what that screening would be worth.
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EpiSEM-Bench: Evaluating Safety and Evidence Recovery in LLM Agents under Missing Evidence
When a tool hides a safety fact, agents can still do the forbidden thing, even if every returned sentence is true.
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Escaping the Phylogenetic Trap: Persistent Homology Enables Cross-Species Ion Channel Classification via Multimodal Graph Neural Networks
Random splits inflate venom-target accuracy; persistent homology holds up better when the next species is unseen.
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One-shot entanglement generation and distillation via Petz recovery and binary hypothesis testing
A trace inequality turns Petz recovery into hypothesis-testing bounds for one-shot entanglement over noisy links.
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BrickWright: Agentic Creation of Physically Feasible Brick Builds
Give coding agents a brick-assembly API and a physics checker, and illegal LEGO-like piles become feasible builds on every prompt in a 512-prompt sample.
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AI Mindmeld: A Latent Interconnect Protocol
Protein and molecule specialists plug into frozen language models through trained connectors, so scientific agents can share latent knowledge instead of squeez…
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Benchmarking Recent Single-Cell Synthetic Data Generation Methods on the OneK1K Dataset
On a donor-split immune atlas, copying the quiet genes leaks people; Poisson reconstruction of those genes is what actually moves membership inference toward c…
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Synthetic 2D magnetic turbulence with controlled island structuring
A geometric add-on to an open turbulence toolkit draws 100,000-by-100,000 magnetic island fields on one CPU, matching expensive plasma simulations by eye and b…
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Humanoid Mobility via Attention-based Contacts
Humanoids treat future contacts as a learned plan, not a pose tape, so motion data stays a training prior while the robot walks from onboard sensors alone.
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Cost-Aware Abstention for LLM-Based IT Ticket Classification
Wrong IT ticket routes can cost more than a human glance. Frozen cost-aware abstention cuts that bill on a public eight-class corpus, and prompted models still…
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ConQEC: Concolic Testing for Quantum Error-Correcting Code Implementations
Concolic tests replay Pauli faults through quantum error-correction software and pinpoint where the repair path first breaks, on codes with up to thousands of…
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Anomalous polar chains in halide perovskites
Cubic CsGeBr3 hosts germanium polar chains tens of nanometers long that flip on nanosecond clocks — four orders of magnitude slower than BaTiO3 or PbTiO3.
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Formation and Detectability of PSR J0653+0443-like Extremely Eccentric Binary Neutron Stars in the Milky Way
A Galactic neutron-star binary with eccentricity about 0.992 is rare but allowed: selection-aware synthesis expects about 0.3 such systems across FAST’s planne…
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Prompt Jet Launching and Delayed Thermal Disk in Tidal Disruption Event for Prolonged Activity GRB 220706A
Debris-stream shocks plus fossil magnetic flux can launch GRB 220706A’s early jet, then a delayed disk can explain the late optical thermal glow — if a 10^5-so…
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Predictive electronic feedback control for narrow-linewidth lasers
A Smith-predictor FPGA inside the PDH loop cuts servo bumps without extra optics.
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Hydrodynamics of microalgae in sea spray
Jet-drop hydrodynamics, not surface films, explain how large algal cells ride sea spray into coastal air.
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Non-Destructive Detection of Early Drought Stress via Spectral Submanifold Analysis
A sign flip in a soybean stem's nonlinear damping flags drought before leaves wilt.
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Modelling wide-swath altimeter observation-error correlations with a regularised diffusion operator
A regularised diffusion operator lets SWOT's small-scale ocean signal survive data assimilation.
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Analytical Modeling of Modulated Heating for Three-Dimensional Anisotropic Optical Thermometry of Multilayered Cylinders
Closed-form heat flow in layered, anisotropic cylinders turns optical thermometry into a 3D property probe.
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