Shadows in the Big Bang Afterglow Reveal Invisible Cosmic Structures
Cosmologists are using secondary signatures from the cosmic microwave background to map the universe’s hidden matter.
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How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities
Richard Feynman’s path integral is both a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy about how the world is. But physicists are still struggling to figure out how to use it, and what it means.
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Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning
“Liquid” neural nets, based on a worm’s nervous system, can transform their underlying algorithms on the fly, giving them unprecedented speed and adaptability.
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Mobile Genes From the Mother Shape the Baby’s Microbiome
Tiny genetic sequences in a mother’s bacteria seem to hop into the infant’s bacteria, perhaps ensuring a healthy microbiome later in life.
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The Brain Uses Calculus to Control Fast Movements
Researchers discover that to sharpen its control over precise maneuvers, the brain uses comparisons between control signals—not the signals themselves.
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Brightest-Ever Space Explosion Reveals Possible Hints of Dark Matter
A recent gamma-ray burst known as the BOAT—“brightest of all time”—appears to have produced a high-energy particle that shouldn’t exist. For some, dark matter provides the explanation.
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How Shannon Entropy Imposes Fundamental Limits on Communication
What’s a message, really? Claude Shannon recognized that the elemental ingredient is surprise.
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A Numerical Mystery From the 19th Century Finally Gets Solved
Two mathematicians have proven Patterson’s conjecture, which was designed to explain a strange pattern in sums involving prime numbers.
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How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything
The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum.
