~quanta-magazine | Bookmarks (62)
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Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time
Seventy years after the invention of a data structure called a hash table, theoreticians have found...
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Radio Maps May Reveal the Universe’s Biggest Magnetic Fields
A controversial technique has produced detailed maps of the magnetic fields in colossal galaxy clusters. If...
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What Your Brain Is Doing When You’re Not Doing Anything | Quanta Magazine
When your mind is wandering, your brain’s “default mode” network is active. Its discovery 20 years...
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In a ‘Dark Dimension,’ Physicists Search for Missing Matter | Quanta Magazine
An idea derived from string theory suggests that dark matter is hiding in a (relatively) large...
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What Makes for ‘Good’ Mathematics? | Quanta Magazine
Terence Tao, who has been called the “Mozart of Mathematics,” wrote an essay in 2007 about...
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The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal | Quanta Magazine
For decades, a small group of mathematicians has patiently unraveled the mystery of what was once...
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The Best Neighborhoods for Starting a Life in the Galaxy
Some neighborhoods in the Milky Way may be better suited for making habitable planets than others....
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New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text | Quanta Magazine
Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to...
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Clashing Cosmic Numbers Challenge Our Best Theory of the Universe | Quanta Magazine
As measurements of distant stars and galaxies become more precise, cosmologists are struggling to make sense...
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Math’s ‘Game of Life’ Reveals Long-Sought Repeating Patterns
John Conway’s Game of Life, a famous cellular automaton, has been found to have periodic patterns...
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The Quest for Simple Rules to Build a Microbial Community | Quanta Magazine
Microbiologists are searching for a universal theory of how bacteria form communities based not on their...
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New Kind of Magnetism Spotted in an Engineered Material
In an atomically thin stack of semiconductors, a mechanism unseen in any natural substance causes electrons’...
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‘Magical’ Error Correction Scheme Proved Inherently Inefficient | Quanta Magazine
Locally correctable codes need barely any information to fix errors, but they’re extremely long. Now we...