Bookmarks (53)

By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. The post How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Founding editor-in-chief Thomas Lin looks back at a decade of Quanta journalism and forward to what’s next for the magazine. The post My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine first appeared on Quanta Magazine

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community. The post Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more. The post Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians have struggled to prove Falconer’s Conjecture, a simple, but far-reaching, hypothesis about the distances between points. They’re finally getting close. The post Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The timing of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024, will be known to within a second, thousands of years after fearful humans first started trying to anticipate these cosmic events. The post How the Ancient Art of Eclipse Prediction Became an Exact Science first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A generation of physicists has referred to the dark energy that permeates the universe as “the cosmological constant.” Now the largest map of the cosmos to date hints that this mysterious energy has been changing over billions of years. The post Dark Energy May Be Weakening, Major Astrophysics Study Finds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

After a decade out of the spotlight, the brain cells once alleged to explain empathy, autism and theory of mind are being refined and redefined. The post Overexposure Distorted the Science of Mirror Neurons first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians have illuminated what sets of points can look like if the distances between them are all whole numbers. The post Merging Fields, Mathematicians Go the Distance on Old Problem first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Our brain waves can align when we work and play closely together. The phenomenon, known as interbrain synchrony, suggests that collaboration is biological. The post The Social Benefits of Getting Our Brains in Sync first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. From chaotic assemblies of life, order somehow emerges. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz interviews the evolutionary ecologist Iain Couzin about how and why collective behaviors arise. The post How Is Flocking Like Computing? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Russell Impagliazzo studies hard problems, the limits of cryptography, the nature of randomness and more. The post The Researcher Who Explores Computation by Conjuring New Worlds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians are using topological abstractions to find places where it’s hard to vote. The post Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In the search for the most scalable hardware to use for quantum computers, qubits made of individual atoms are having a breakout moment. The post The Best Qubits for Quantum Computing Might Just Be Atoms first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Recursion builds bridges between ideas from across different math classes and illustrates the power of creative mathematical thinking. The post Math That Connects Where We’re Going to Where We’ve Been first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are beginning to understand why. The post How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The French mathematician spent decades developing a set of tools now widely used for taming random processes. The post Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres. The post Doubts Grow About the Biosignature Approach to Alien-Hunting first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Electroconvulsive therapy is highly effective in treating major depressive disorder, but no one knows why it works. New research suggests it may restore balance between excitation and inhibition in the brain. The post Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Explain Value of Shock Therapy first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces and pressures inside a subatomic particle for the first time. The post Swirling Forces, Crushing Pressures Measured in the Proton first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Teleporting people through space is still science fiction. But quantum teleportation is dramatically different and entirely real. In this episode, Janna Levin interviews the theoretical physicist John Preskill about teleporting bits and the promise of quantum technology. The post What Is Quantum Teleportation? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The recipient of the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics discusses math as art, math as language, and math as abstract thought. The post ‘The Rest of the World Disappears’: Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The visual systems of an obscure group of mollusks provide a rare natural example of path-dependent evolution, in which a critical fork in the creatures’ past determined their evolutionary futures. The post Mollusk Eyes Reveal How Future Evolution Depends on the Past first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Time is all around us: in the language we use, in the memories we revisit and in our predictions of the future. But what exactly is it? The physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek joins Steve Strogatz to discuss the fundamental hallmarks of time. The post What Is the Nature of Time? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Simple rules in simple settings continue to puzzle mathematicians, even as they devise intricate tools to analyze them. The post ‘Entropy Bagels’ and Other Complex Structures Emerge From Simple Rules first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A series of advances seemed to promise the impossible: the existence of quantum states that would never, ever fall into disarray. But physicists are now discovering that the pull of disorder may not be so easily overcome. The post A Quantum Trick Implied Eternal Stability. Now the Idea May Be Falling Apart. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Two researchers have proved that Penrose tilings, famous patterns that never repeat, are mathematically equivalent to a kind of quantum error correction. The post Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Play Quanta Magazine’s daily interactive math game, Hyperjumps! The post Hyperjumps Math Game first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The surprisingly subtle geometry of a familiar game shows how quickly math gets complicated. The post Unfolding the Mysteries of Polygonal Billiards first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Highly repetitive regions of junk DNA may be the key to a newly discovered mechanism for gene regulation. The post A ‘Lobby’ Where a Molecule Mob Tells Genes What to Do first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new study suggests that so-called emergent abilities actually develop gradually and predictably, depending on how you measure them. The post How Quickly Do Large Language Models Learn Unexpected Skills? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The astrophysicist Erin Kara measures time lags in black holes’ X-ray glows, which reveal the complexity of the objects’ closest surroundings. The post To See Black Holes in Stunning Detail, She Uses ‘Echoes’ Like a Bat first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Seventy years after the invention of a data structure called a hash table, theoreticians have found the most efficient possible configuration for it. The post Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A controversial technique has produced detailed maps of the magnetic fields in colossal galaxy clusters. If confirmed, the approach could be used to reveal where cosmic magnetic fields come from. The post Radio Maps May Reveal the Universe’s Biggest Magnetic Fields first appeared on Quanta Magazine

When your mind is wandering, your brain’s “default mode” network is active. Its discovery 20 years ago inspired a raft of research into networks of brain regions and how they interact with each other. The post What Your Brain Is Doing When You’re Not Doing Anything first appeared on Quanta Magazine

An idea derived from string theory suggests that dark matter is hiding in a (relatively) large extra dimension. The theory makes testable predictions that physicists are investigating now. The post In a ‘Dark Dimension,’ Physicists Search for the Universe’s Missing Matter first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Terence Tao, who has been called the “Mozart of Mathematics,” wrote an essay in 2007 about the common ingredients in “good” mathematical research. In this episode, the Fields Medalist joins Steven Strogatz to revisit the topic. The post What Makes for ‘Good’ Mathematics? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

For decades, a small group of mathematicians has patiently unraveled the mystery of what was once math’s most popular picture. Their story shows how technology transforms even the most abstract mathematical landscapes. The post The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Some neighborhoods in the Milky Way may be better suited for making habitable planets than others. The post The Best Neighborhoods for Starting a Life in the Galaxy first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing. The post New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text first appeared on Quanta Magazine

As measurements of distant stars and galaxies become more precise, cosmologists are struggling to make sense of sparring values. The post Clashing Cosmic Numbers Challenge Our Best Theory of the Universe first appeared on Quanta Magazine

John Conway’s Game of Life, a famous cellular automaton, has been found to have periodic patterns of every possible length. The post Math’s ‘Game of Life’ Reveals Long-Sought Repeating Patterns first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Microbiologists are searching for a universal theory of how bacteria form communities based not on their species but on the roles they play. The post The Quest for Simple Rules to Build a Microbial Community first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In an atomically thin stack of semiconductors, a mechanism unseen in any natural substance causes electrons’ spins to align. The post New Kind of Magnetism Spotted in an Engineered Material first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Locally correctable codes need barely any information to fix errors, but they’re extremely long. Now we know that the simplest versions can’t get any shorter. The post ‘Magical’ Error Correction Scheme Proved Inherently Inefficient first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Biologists discovered that mitochondria in different tissues talk to each other to repair injured cells. When their signal fails, the biological clock starts winding down. The post Cells Across the Body Talk to Each Other About Aging first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Why does natural selection appear to happen slowly on long timescales and quickly on short ones? A multigenerational study of four lizard species addresses biology’s “paradox of stasis.” The post Evolution: Fast or Slow? Lizards Help Resolve a Paradox. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Landmark results in Ramsey theory and a remarkably simple aperiodic tile capped a year of mathematical delight and discovery. The post The Year in Math first appeared on Quanta Magazine

From the smallest scales to the largest, the physical world provided no shortage of surprises this year. The post The Year in Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Artificial intelligence learned how to generate text and art better than ever before, while computer scientists developed algorithms that solved long-standing problems. The post The Year in Computer Science first appeared on Quanta Magazine