Bookmarks (53)

Reversible programs run backward as easily as they run forward, saving energy in theory. After decades of research, they may soon power AI. The post How Can AI Researchers Save Energy? By Going Backward. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.” The post How Paradoxical Questions and Simple Wonder Lead to Great Science first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new proof illuminates the hidden patterns that emerge when addition becomes impossible. The post Graduate Student Solves Classic Problem About the Limits of Addition first appeared on Quanta Magazine

One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science. The post For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Slight changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of flight muscles provide extra energy for birds’ continent-spanning feats. The post ‘Turbocharged’ Mitochondria Power Birds’ Epic Migratory Journeys first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Turbulence is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to study. Mathematicians are now starting to untangle it at its smallest scales. The post New ‘Superdiffusion’ Proof Probes the Mysterious Math of Turbulence first appeared on Quanta Magazine

From living matter to molecules to elementary particles, the world is made of “chiral” objects that differ from their reflected forms. The post How the Universe Differs From Its Mirror Image first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Exploring the distant universe, the insides of cells, the abstractions of math, the complexity of information itself and much more, The Quanta Podcast will be a tour of the frontier between the known and the unknown. The post Introducing The Quanta Podcast first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Researchers have devised a scheme for painting the edges of a graph that’s almost as speedy as possible. The post The Fastest Way Yet to Color Graphs first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The physicist Sidney Nagel delights in solving mysteries of the universe that are hiding in plain sight. The post Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences first appeared on Quanta Magazine

How do memories last a lifetime when the molecules that form them turn over within days, weeks or months? An interaction between two proteins points to a molecular basis for memory. The post The Molecular Bond That Helps Secure Your Memories first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new proof represents the culmination of a 65-year-old story about anomalous shapes in special dimensions. The post Dimension 126 Contains Strangely Twisted Shapes, Mathematicians Prove first appeared on Quanta Magazine

AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can process language could unlock deeper insights into both AI and the human mind. The post Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist. The post Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI first appeared on Quanta Magazine

We asked some of the world’s foremost experts an impossible question. Amazingly, they answered. The post Where Do Scientists Think This Is All Going? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Technology has forever served as science’s toolbox. But now that AI is being used to develop questions and methods as well, some scientists wonder what their role is going to become. The post What Happens When AI Starts To Ask the Questions? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians have started to prepare for a profound shift in what it means to do math. The post Mathematical Beauty, Truth and Proof in the Age of AI first appeared on Quanta Magazine

AI researchers are using techniques inspired by neuroscience to study how language models work — and to reveal how perplexing they can be. The post Why Language Models Are So Hard To Understand first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Rose Yu has a plan for how to make AI better, faster and smarter — and it’s already yielding results. The post Improving Deep Learning With a Little Help From Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Micro decisions can have macro consequences. A soft matter physicist reveals how interactions within simple cellular collectives can lead to emergent physical traits. The post How a Biofilm’s Strange Shape Emerges From Cellular Geometry first appeared on Quanta Magazine

According to mathematical legend, Peter Sarnak and Noga Alon made a bet about optimal graphs in the late 1980s. They’ve now both been proved wrong. The post New Proof Settles Decades-Old Bet About Connected Networks first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Quantum gravity could help physicists unite the currently incompatible worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity. In this episode, Monika Schleier-Smith discusses her pioneering experimental approach, using laser-cooled atoms to explore whether gravity could emerge from quantum entanglement. The post Can Quantum Gravity Be Created in the Lab? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Every soft caress of wind, searing burn and seismic rumble is detected by our skin’s tangle of touch sensors. David Ginty has spent his career cataloging the neurons beneath everyday sensations. The post Touch, Our Most Complex Sense, Is a Landscape of Cellular Sensors first appeared on Quanta Magazine

We insist that large language models repeatedly translate their mathematical processes into words. There may be a better way. The post To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles — a new category of quantum particle — could be created in exotic materials. The post ‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is using category theory to try to understand both human and AI-generated language. The post Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Complex neural pathways likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times. The post Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals first appeared on Quanta Magazine

When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement — and its inverse — have deep connections to many areas of math and computer science. The post How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Despite the hype, it’s been surprisingly challenging to find quantum algorithms that outperform classical ones. In this episode, Ewin Tang discusses her pioneering work in “dequantizing” quantum algorithms — and what it means for the future of quantum computing. The post What Is the True Promise of Quantum Computing? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. The post Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A powerful mathematical technique is used to model melting ice and other phenomena. But it has long been imperiled by certain “nightmare scenarios.” A new proof has removed that obstacle. The post A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Randomness is essential to some research, but it’s always been prohibitively complicated. Now, we can use “pseudorandomness” instead. The post The High Cost of Quantum Randomness Is Dropping first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A popular hypothesis for how the brain clears molecular waste, which may help explain why sleep feels refreshing, is a subject of debate. The post The Mysterious Flow of Fluid in the Brain first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A simple, widely used mathematical technique can finally be applied to boundlessly complex problems. The post Three Hundred Years Later, a Tool from Isaac Newton Gets an Update first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A growing body of work suggests that cell metabolism — the chemical reactions that provide energy and building materials — plays a vital, overlooked role in the first steps of life. The post How Metabolism Can Shape Cells’ Destinies first appeared on Quanta Magazine

One of the most important events in the history of life on Earth was the emergence of multicellularity. In this episode, Will Ratcliff discusses how his snowflake yeast models provide insight into what drove the transition from single-celled to multicellular organisms. The post How Did Multicellular Life Evolve? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks. The post Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a whole crop of related problems. The post ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions of our time, with 12 all-new episodes and a new format. The post New Conversations, Deep Questions, Bold Ideas in Season Four of ‘The Joy of Why’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place. The post The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Larger models can pull off greater feats, but the accessibility and efficiency of smaller models make them attractive tools. The post Why Do Researchers Care About Small Language Models? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle. The post ‘Next-Level’ Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species. The post A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new proof extends the work of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, cementing her legacy as a pioneer of alien mathematical realms. The post Years After the Early Death of a Math Genius, Her Ideas Gain New Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward. The post The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a variety of coral shapes. The post The ‘Elegant’ Math Model That Could Help Rescue Coral Reefs first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists hope that understanding the churning region near singularities might help them reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. The post New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes first appeared on Quanta Magazine

By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences. The post How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to understand the implications. The post Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences. The post How Hans Bethe Stumbled Upon Perfect Quantum Theories first appeared on Quanta Magazine