Researchers Gain New Understanding From Simple AI
Language processing programs are notoriously hard to interpret, but smaller versions can provide important insights into how they work.
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Life’s First Peptides May Have Grown on RNA Strands
RNA and peptides coevolving in the primordial world might have jointly served as a precursor to the modern ribosome.
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Math’s “Oldest Problem Ever” Gets a New Answer
A new proof significantly strengthens a decades-old result about the ubiquity of ways to represent whole numbers as sums of fractions.
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Four Years On, New Experiment Sees No Sign of “Cosmic Dawn”
When astronomers tried to confirm a signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, they saw nothing.
The ‘Weirdest’ Matter, Made of Partial Particles, Defies Description
Theorists are in a frenzy over “fractons,” bizarre, but potentially useful, hypothetical particles that can only move in combination with one another.
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AI Overcomes Stumbling Block on Brain-Inspired Hardware
Algorithms that use the brain’s communication signal can now work on analog neuromorphic chips, which closely mimic our energy-efficient brains.
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How the Physics of Resonance Shapes Reality
The same phenomenon by which an opera singer can shatter a wineglass also underlies the very existence of subatomic particles.
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An Ancient Geometry Problem Falls to New Mathematical Techniques
Three mathematicians show, for the first time, how to form a square with the same area as a circle by cutting them into interchangeable pieces that can be visualized.
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An Injection of Chaos Solves Decades-Old Fluid Mystery
In the 1960s, drillers noticed that certain fluids would firm up if they flowed too fast. Researchers have finally explained why.
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Detailed Footage Finally Reveals What Triggers Lightning
Scientists have never been able to adequately explain where lightning comes from. Now the first detailed observations of its emergence inside a cloud have exposed how electric fields grow strong enough to let bolts fly.
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Gravitational Waves Should Permanently Distort Space-Time
The “gravitational memory effect” predicts that a passing gravitational wave should forever alter the structure of space-time. Physicists have linked the phenomenon to a potential solution to the black hole information paradox.
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AI Researchers Fight Noise by Turning to Biology
Tiny amounts of artificial noise can fool neural networks, but not humans. Some researchers are looking to neuroscience for a fix.
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Quantum Simulators Create a Totally New Phase of Matter
One of the first goals of quantum computing has been to recreate bizarre quantum systems that can’t be studied in an ordinary computer. A dark-horse quantum simulator has now done just that.
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Mathematicians Find Structure in Biased Polynomials
New work establishes a tighter connection between the rank of a polynomial and the extent to which it favors particular outputs.
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An Ultra-Precise Clock Shows How to Link the Quantum World With Gravity
Time was found to flow differently between the top and bottom of a single cloud of atoms. Physicists hope that such a system will one day help them combine quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.
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How Wavelets Allow Researchers to Transform, and Understand, Data
Built upon the ubiquitous Fourier transform, the mathematical tools known as wavelets allow unprecedented analysis and understanding of continuous signals.
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In Topology, When Are Two Shapes the Same?
As topologists seek to classify shapes, the effort hinges on how to define a manifold and what it means for two of them to be equivalent.
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The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’
Genomes hold immense quantities of noncoding DNA. Some of it is essential for life, some seems useless, and some has its own agenda.
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Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Major Research Algorithm
The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem.
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Turing Patterns Turn Up in a Tiny Crystal
The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale.
