Bookmarks (45)

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    Evolving Bacteria Can Evade Barriers to ‘Peak’ Fitness | Quanta Magazine

    Paradoxically, natural selection can sometimes seem to block organisms from evolving useful adaptations. But a new...

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    Pierre de Fermat’s Link to a High School Student’s Prime Math Proof | Quanta Magazine

    How Fermat’s less famous "little theorem" got mathematicians young and old to play with prime-like Carmichael...

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    In the Gut’s ‘Second Brain,’ Key Agents of Health Emerge | Quanta Magazine

    Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key...

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    Researchers Refute a Widespread Belief About Online Algorithms

    Three computer scientists have disproved a long-standing conjecture about a fundamental problem involving imperfect information. The...

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    The Astonishing Behavior of Recursive Sequences

    Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have...

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    Google DeepMind Trains ‘Artificial Brainstorming’ in Chess AI | Quanta Magazine

    By bringing together disparate approaches, machines can reach a new level of creative problem-solving. The post...

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    Rogue Worlds Throw Planetary Ideas Out of Orbit

    Scientists have recently discovered scores of free-floating worlds that defy classification. The new observations have forced...

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    Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better

    The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new...

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    The Scientist Who Decodes the Songs of Undersea Volcanoes

    In the rumbles and groans of underwater volcanoes, Jackie Caplan-Auerbach finds her favorite harmonies — and...

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    Cryptographers Devise an Approach for Total Search Privacy | Quanta Magazine

    Three researchers have found a long-sought way to pull information from large databases secretly, moving us...

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    These Moons Are Dark and Frozen. So How Can They Have Oceans?

    The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn appear to have subsurface oceans — tantalizing targets in the...

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    The Hidden Connection That Changed Number Theory

    Quadratic reciprocity lurks around many corners in mathematics. By proving it, number theorists reimagined their whole...

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    A Brief History of Tricky Mathematical Tiling | Quanta Magazine

    The discovery earlier this year of the “hat” tile marked the culmination of hundreds of years...

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    A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers

    New work attacks a long-standing barrier to understanding how prime numbers are distributed. The post A...

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    Biophysicists Uncover Powerful Symmetries in Living Tissue | Quanta Magazine

    After identifying interlocking symmetries in mammalian cells, scientists can describe some tissues as liquid crystals —...

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    The Computing Pioneer Helping AI See

    Alexei Efros has spent his career learning how machines see differently from humans. Now he’s helping...

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    The Quest to Quantify Quantumness | Quanta Magazine

    What makes a quantum computer more powerful than a classical computer? It’s a surprisingly subtle question...

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    These Cells Spark Electricity in the Brain. They’re Not Neurons.

    For decades, researchers have debated whether brain cells called astrocytes can signal like neurons. Researchers recently...

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    Thirty Years Later, a Speed Boost for Quantum Factoring | Quanta Magazine

    Shor’s algorithm will enable future quantum computers to factor large numbers quickly, undermining many online security...

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    The Mathematician Who Shaped String Theory | Quanta Magazine

    Eugenio Calabi, who died on September 25, conceived of novel geometric objects that later became fundamental...

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    The Deep Link Equating Math Proofs and Computer Programs | Quanta Magazine

    Mathematical logic and the code of computer programs are, in an exact way, mirror images of...

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    Invisible Electron ‘Demon’ Discovered in Odd Superconductor | Quanta Magazine

    Physicists have long suspected that hunks of metal could vibrate in a peculiar way that would...

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    Tiny Language Models Thrive With GPT-4 as a Teacher | Quanta Magazine

    To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic...

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    Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize | Quanta Magazine

    The development of attosecond pulses of light allowed researchers to explore the frame-by-frame movement of electrons....

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    How Simple Math Moves the Needle | Quanta Magazine

    The spatial intuition behind a three-point turn offers an on-ramp to a century-old geometry problem. The...

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    Mathematicians Cross the Line to Get to the Point | Quanta Magazine

    A new paper establishes a long-conjectured bound about the size of the overlap between sets of...

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    The Experimental Cosmologist Hunting for the First Sunrise | Quanta Magazine

    To catch even a whiff of the universe’s earliest epochs — an age of darkness, and...

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    What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells | Quanta Magazine

    Every species develops at its own unique tempo, leaving scientists to wonder what governs their timing....

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    ‘Species Repulsion’ Enables High Biodiversity in Tropical Trees | Quanta Magazine

    Because tree seedlings don’t grow as well when close to their parents, more tree species can...

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    A Tower of Conjectures That Rests Upon a Needle

    On its surface, the Kakeya conjecture is a simple statement about rotating needles. But it underlies...

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    The Biggest Smallest Triangle Just Got Smaller | Quanta Magazine

    A new proof breaks a decades-long drought of progress on the problem of estimating the size...

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    Magnetism May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry

    The preferred “handedness” of biomolecules could have emerged from biased interactions between electrons and magnetic surfaces,...

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    Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking

    Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal...

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    Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact | Quanta Magazine

    Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite...

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    The Hidden Brain Connections Between Our Hands and Tongues | Quanta Magazine

    Sticking out your tongue while doing delicate work with your hands reveals a history of evolutionary...

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    New Codes Could Make Quantum Computing 10 Times More Efficient | Quanta Magazine

    Quantum computing is still really, really hard. But the rise of a powerful class of error-correcting...

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    What a Contest of Consciousness Theories Really Proved | Quanta Magazine

    A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an...

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    An Old Conjecture Falls, Making Spheres a Lot More Complicated | Quanta Magazine

    The telescope conjecture gave mathematicians a handle on ways to map one sphere to another. Now...

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    Quaking Giants Might Solve the Mysteries of Stellar Magnetism

    In their jiggles and shakes, red giant stars encode a record of the magnetic fields near...

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    Andreas Wagner Pursues the Secrets to Evolutionary Success

    Why did mammals, grasses and some other groups of organisms explode in diversity only after millions...

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    Risky Giant Steps Can Solve Optimization Problems Faster | Quanta Magazine

    New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm. The post Risky...

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    Two Students Unravel a Widely Believed Math Conjecture | Quanta Magazine

    Mathematicians thought they were on the cusp of proving a conjecture about the ancient structures known...

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    Even Synthetic Life Forms With a Tiny Genome Can Evolve | Quanta Magazine

    By watching “minimal” cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can...

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    Exoplanets Could Help Us Learn How Planets Make Magnetism | Quanta Magazine

    New observations of a faraway rocky world that might have its own magnetic field could help...