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AI House Davos

Embodied AI refers to AI integrated into physical systems that can perceive, reason, and act in the real world through sensors and actuators, like robots and autonomous vehicles. This fireside conversation explores how advances in AI like vision–language–action models are redefining what machines can understand and do, especially as we move from navigation to mobile manipulation. The speakers discuss how quickly today’s rapid progress in AI might transfer to robotics and embodied systems, and how soon we can expect to see these technologies making a tangible impact on our daily lives.

Speakers.
Yann LeCun (Advanced Machine Intelligence, Founder and Executive Chairman)
Marc Pollefeys (ETH Zürich and Faculty, ETH AI Center, Professor)

© AI House Davos 2026
Founders & Strategic Partners:
ETH AI Center, Merantix, G42, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, EPFL AI Center, The University of Tokyo.

Presenting Partners:
KPMG.

Scientists Discover a New “Cleanup Hub” Inside the Human Brain

How does the brain clear away waste? This task is handled by the brain’s lymphatic drainage system, and attempts to understand how it operates have driven major advances in brain imaging.

A new study published in iScience by researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina reports the first human evidence of a previously unrecognized center of lymphatic drainage in the brain, the middle meningeal artery (MMA).

Using a NASA collaboration that gave them access to real-time MRI tools originally designed to study how spaceflight alters fluid movement in the brain, the MUSC team, led by Onder Albayram, Ph.D., followed the movement of cerebrospinal and interstitial fluids along the MMA in five healthy volunteers over six hours. Their observations showed that cerebrospinal fluid moved slowly and passively, a pattern consistent with lymphatic drainage rather than blood circulation, which would be faster and more pulsatile.

Breakthrough laser technique holds quantum matter in stable packets

For the first time, physicists have generated and observed stable bright matter-wave solitons with attractive interactions within a grid of laser light.

In the quantum world, atoms usually travel as waves that spread out, but solitons stay concentrated in one spot. They have been created before in open space, but this is the first time they have been stabilized inside a repeating laser structure using attractive forces. This development gives scientists a new way to hold and guide clusters of atoms, a key requirement for developing future quantum technologies.

The research is published in a paper in Physical Review Letters.

Hydrogen’s role in generating free electrons in silicon finally explained

Researchers announced that they have achieved the world’s first elucidation of how hydrogen produces free electrons through the interaction with certain defects in silicon. The achievement has the potential to improve how insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) are designed and manufactured, making them more efficient and reducing their power loss. It is also expected to open up possibilities for future devices using ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) materials.

In the global drive toward carbon neutrality, efforts to make power electronics more efficient and energy-saving are accelerating worldwide. IGBTs are key components responsible for power conversion, so improving their efficiency is a major priority. While hydrogen ion implantation has been used for about half a century to control electron concentration in silicon, the underlying mechanism has remained unclear until now.

In 2023, Mitsubishi Electric and University of Tsukuba jointly discovered a defect complex in silicon that contributes to increasing electron concentration. They confirmed that this complex is formed when an interstitial silicon pair and hydrogen bind, but the reason why free electrons are newly generated in this process was still unclear.

Chiral phonons create orbital current via their own magnetism

In a new study, an international group of researchers has found that chiral phonons can create orbital current without needing magnetic elements—in part because chiral phonons have their own magnetic moments. Additionally, this effect can be achieved in common crystal materials. The work has potential for the development of less expensive, energy-efficient orbitronic devices for use in a wide array of electronics.

All electronic devices are based upon the charge of an electron, and electrons have three intrinsic properties: spin, charge and orbital angular momentum. While researchers have long explored the use of spin as a more efficient way to create current, the field of orbitronics —based upon using an electron’s orbital angular momentum, rather than its spin, to create a current flow—is still relatively new.

“Traditionally it has been technically challenging to generate orbital current,” says Dali Sun, co-corresponding author on the study published in Nature Physics. Sun is a professor of physics and member of the Organic and Carbon Electronics Lab (ORaCEL) at North Carolina State University.

Japan wakes up world’s biggest nuclear plant 15 years after Fukushima disaster

Just under 15 years after the catastrophic nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Japan has officially restarted a reactor at the world’s largest nuclear plant.

While many argue for the benefits that nuclear power can provide amid a rapidly growing climate crisis, the dangers that it poses are evident across a number of notably horrific incidents over the years.

Disasters in Kyshtym and Chernobyl have displayed the dangerous potential that a nuclear accident can cause, and few have been quite as devastating as the incident that occurred in Fukushima back in 2011.

Washington state proposes new 3D-printed gun controls with ‘blocking features’ and blueprint detection algorithm — proposal would carry sentences of five years in prison, $15,000 fine for violation

All three are explained in more detail in the bill, but arrive at broadly the same destination. This law, if approved, would prevent 3D printer brands from selling their wares in Washington State without stringent controls to prevent the printing of 3D firearms, or indeed parts that could be used to modify existing weapons.

According to the bill, violating this proposed law would be a class C felony, which means anyone found in violation of these terms could face up to five years in prison and a $15,000 fine.

Washington is not the first state to propose addressing 3D-printed firearms by way of legislation, and is unlikely to be the last. Earlier this month New York took steps to ban 3D-printed guns, proposing the mandating of 3D printer safeguards and cracking down on the sharing and possession of 3D files containing guns or gun components.

Wildfires trigger massive soil loss for decades, new global map shows

Wildfires are devastating events that destroy forests, burn homes and force people to leave their communities. They also have a profound impact on local ecosystems. But there is another problem that has been largely overlooked until now. When rain falls on the charred landscapes, it increases surface runoff and soil erosion that can last for decades, according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience.

On average, wildfires burn approximately 4 million square kilometers of land per year, an area equivalent to the size of the European Union. Despite this, there hasn’t been a global long-term assessment of how these fires affect soil erosion over time. So researchers from the European Commission’s Joint Research Center and the University of Basel, Switzerland, studied two decades’ worth of data to compile the world’s first global map of post-fire soil erosion.

The team used a sophisticated computer model called RUSLE (Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation), which they adapted for post-fire conditions to calculate how much soil moves based on factors such as vegetation cover and rainfall intensity. They combined this with satellite data of global wildfires from 2001 to 2019 and compared these areas with how the land looked before the flames took hold.

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