~quanta-magazine | Bookmarks (56)
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Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture | Quanta Magazine
In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part...
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What Are Sheaves? | Quanta Magazine
These metaphorical gardens have become central objects in modern mathematics. The post What Are Sheaves? first...
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Will AI Ever Have Common Sense? | Quanta Magazine
Common sense has been viewed as one of the hardest challenges in AI. That said, ChatGPT4...
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Tight-Knit Microbes Live Together to Make a Vital Nutrient | Quanta Magazine
At sea, biologists discovered microbial partners that together produce nitrogen, a nutrient essential for life. The...
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‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers | Quanta Magazine
The proof creates stricter limits on potential exceptions to the famous Riemann hypothesis. The post ‘Sensational’...
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What Could Explain the Gallium Anomaly? | Quanta Magazine
Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment,...
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How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold | Quanta Magazine
Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently. The post How America’s Fastest...
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What Is Machine Learning? | Quanta Magazine
Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement...
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What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us? | Quanta Magazine
If you cover a surface with tiles, repetitive patterns always emerge — or do they? In...
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Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine | Quanta Magazine
After decades of uncertainty, a motley team of programmers has proved precisely how complicated simple computer...
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Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy | Quanta Magazine
Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a...
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Why Is This Shape So Terrible to Pack? | Quanta Magazine
Two mathematicians have proved a long-standing conjecture that is a step on the way toward finding...
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How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It | Quanta Magazine
Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date,...
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How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number | Quanta Magazine
Useful mathematical concepts, like the number line, can linger for millennia before they are rigorously defined....
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How Is Science Even Possible? | Quanta Magazine
How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make...
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Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time...
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The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes | Quanta Magazine
Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and...
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Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health? | Quanta Magazine
Research suggests that psychedelic drugs can reopen critical periods of brain development to create opportunities for...
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Most Life on Earth is Dormant, After Pulling an ‘Emergency Brake’ | Quanta Magazine
Many microbes and cells are in deep sleep, waiting for the right moment to activate. Biologists...
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Cryptographers Discover a New Foundation for Quantum Secrecy | Quanta Magazine
Researchers have proved that secure quantum encryption is possible in a world without hard problems. The...
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Simple Equation Predicts the Shapes of Carbon-Capturing Wetlands | Quanta Magazine
To calculate the amount of carbon stored inside peatlands, researchers developed a unified theory of “bog...
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What Happens in the Brain to Cause Depression? | Quanta Magazine
Drugs that target the neurotransmitter serotonin have long been prescribed to treat depression. Now the spotlight...
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AI Needs Enormous Computing Power. Could Light-Based Chips Help? | Quanta Magazine
Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also...
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Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture | Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians have disproved a major conjecture about the relationship between curvature and shape. The post Strangely...