~quanta-magazine | Bookmarks (42)
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A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting | Quanta Magazine
A powerful mathematical technique is used to model melting ice and other phenomena. But it has...
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The High Cost of Quantum Randomness Is Dropping | Quanta Magazine
Randomness is essential to some research, but it’s always been prohibitively complicated. Now, we can use...
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The Mysterious Flow of Fluid in the Brain | Quanta Magazine
A popular hypothesis for how the brain clears molecular waste, which may help explain why sleep...
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Three Hundred Years Later, a Tool from Isaac Newton Gets an Update | Quanta Magazine
A simple, widely used mathematical technique can finally be applied to boundlessly complex problems. The post...
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How Metabolism Can Shape Cells’ Destinies | Quanta Magazine
A growing body of work suggests that cell metabolism — the chemical reactions that provide energy...
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How Did Multicellular Life Evolve? | Quanta Magazine
One of the most important events in the history of life on Earth was the emergence...
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Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems | Quanta Magazine
It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines,...
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‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture | Quanta Magazine
The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the...
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New Conversations, Deep Questions, Bold Ideas in Season Four of ‘The Joy of Why’ | Quanta Magazine
Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions...
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The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’ | Quanta Magazine
Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first,...
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Why Do Researchers Care About Small Language Models? | Quanta Magazine
Larger models can pull off greater feats, but the accessibility and efficiency of smaller models make...
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‘Next-Level’ Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability | Quanta Magazine
In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now...
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A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems | Quanta Magazine
Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among...
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Years After the Early Death of a Math Genius, Her Ideas Gain New Life | Quanta Magazine
A new proof extends the work of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, cementing her legacy as a...
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The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI | Quanta Magazine
By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push...
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The ‘Elegant’ Math Model That Could Help Rescue Coral Reefs | Quanta Magazine
Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a...
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New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes | Quanta Magazine
Physicists hope that understanding the churning region near singularities might help them reconcile gravity and quantum...
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How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories | Quanta Magazine
By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts —...
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Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive | Quanta Magazine
Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now...
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How Hans Bethe Stumbled Upon Perfect Quantum Theories | Quanta Magazine
Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain...
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How Noether’s Theorem Revolutionized Physics | Quanta Magazine
Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century...
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The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA | Quanta Magazine
By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that...
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Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations | Quanta Magazine
Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to...
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How Does Life Happen When There’s Barely Any Light? | Quanta Magazine
Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest...