Bookmarks (41)

A powerful mathematical technique is used to model melting ice and other phenomena. But it has long been imperiled by certain “nightmare scenarios.” A new proof has removed that obstacle. The post A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Randomness is essential to some research, but it’s always been prohibitively complicated. Now, we can use “pseudorandomness” instead. The post The High Cost of Quantum Randomness Is Dropping first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A simple, widely used mathematical technique can finally be applied to boundlessly complex problems. The post Three Hundred Years Later, a Tool from Isaac Newton Gets an Update first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A growing body of work suggests that cell metabolism — the chemical reactions that provide energy and building materials — plays a vital, overlooked role in the first steps of life. The post How Metabolism Can Shape Cells’ Destinies first appeared on Quanta Magazine

One of the most important events in the history of life on Earth was the emergence of multicellularity. In this episode, Will Ratcliff discusses how his snowflake yeast models provide insight into what drove the transition from single-celled to multicellular organisms. The post How Did Multicellular Life Evolve? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks. The post Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a whole crop of related problems. The post ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions of our time, with 12 all-new episodes and a new format. The post New Conversations, Deep Questions, Bold Ideas in Season Four of ‘The Joy of Why’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place. The post The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Larger models can pull off greater feats, but the accessibility and efficiency of smaller models make them attractive tools. The post Why Do Researchers Care About Small Language Models? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle. The post ‘Next-Level’ Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species. The post A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new proof extends the work of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, cementing her legacy as a pioneer of alien mathematical realms. The post Years After the Early Death of a Math Genius, Her Ideas Gain New Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward. The post The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a variety of coral shapes. The post The ‘Elegant’ Math Model That Could Help Rescue Coral Reefs first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists hope that understanding the churning region near singularities might help them reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. The post New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes first appeared on Quanta Magazine

By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences. The post How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to understand the implications. The post Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences. The post How Hans Bethe Stumbled Upon Perfect Quantum Theories first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights continue to shape physics. The post How Noether’s Theorem Revolutionized Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design. The post The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities. The post Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature. The post How Does Life Happen When There’s Barely Any Light? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more complex? We can’t say for sure, but a new search strategy is mapping out the subtle signals that could reveal if the universe had a shape. The post Cosmologists Try a New Way to Measure the Shape of the Universe first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In the late 19th century, Karl Weierstrass invented a fractal-like function that was decried as nothing less than a “deplorable evil.” In time, it would transform the foundations of mathematics. The post The Jagged, Monstrous Function That Broke Calculus first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Individual cells in the brain light up for specific ideas. These concept neurons, once known as “Jennifer Aniston cells,” help us think, imagine and remember episodes from our lives. The post Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build Memories first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof. The post Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new proof marks the first progress in decades on important cases of the so-called kissing problem. Getting there meant doing away with traditional approaches. The post Mathematicians Discover New Way for Spheres to ‘Kiss’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language. By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, linguists can use neural networks to explore how people learn. The post Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Inside the proton, quarks and gluons shift and morph their properties in ways that physicists are still struggling to understand. Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli brings to the problem a perspective unlike many of their peers. The post The Physicist Decoding the Nonbinary Nature of the Subatomic World first appeared on Quanta Magazine

It’s surprisingly difficult to prove one of the most basic properties of a number: whether it can be written as a fraction. A broad new method can help settle this ancient question. The post Rational or Not? This Basic Math Question Took Decades to Answer. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Hypothetical devices that can quickly and accurately answer questions have become a powerful tool in computational complexity theory. The post Why Computer Scientists Consult Oracles first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab. The post Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Biologists used artificial intelligence to make discoveries about molecules and the brain, and overturned long-held assumptions about the immune system and RNA. The post The Year in Biology first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists discovered strange supersolids, constructed new kinds of superconductors, and continued to make the case that the cosmos is far weirder than anyone suspected. The post The Year in Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Landmark results in geometry and number theory marked an exciting year for mathematics, at a time when advances in artificial intelligence are starting to transform the subject’s future. The post The Year in Math first appeared on Quanta Magazine

To make progress on one of number theory’s most elementary questions, two mathematicians turned to an unlikely source. The post Mathematicians Uncover a New Way to Count Prime Numbers first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In a first, researchers have shown that adding more “qubits” to a quantum computer can make it more resilient. It’s an essential step on the long road to practical applications. The post Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Cells in our bodies are constantly dying — and these countless tiny deaths are essential to human health and multicellular life itself. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz speaks with cellular biologist Shai Shaham about what makes a cell “alive” and the latest developments in understanding how and why cells die. The post How Is Cell Death Essential to Life? first appeared on Quanta...

While some fret about technology’s social impacts, Raj Reddy still believes in the power of artificial intelligence to improve lives. The post The AI Pioneer With Provocative Plans for Humanity first appeared on Quanta Magazine