What stirs beneath the weighted velvet of Fano threefolds Fano threefolds are among the most storied objects in algebraic geometry: compact shapes that embody a delicate balance between curvature, symmetry, and latitude for curiosity. When you dress them in weights—giving each coordinate its own scale—you get quasi-smooth weighted hypersurfaces, a realm where geometry fuses with…
Could a Pocket Robot Quietly Calm a Kid’s Heart? Meet the pocket healer: a robot designed to relax with touch In the paper by Morten Roed Frederiksen, Kasper Stoy, and Maja Matarić, researchers set out to test whether a pocket sized companion could nudge a child toward calm in the moment. The aim is simple…
Winds Write the Radio Script In the bustling dance of a neutron star paired with an OB supergiant, the radio and millimeter glow at the edges of the system carry a story that X-ray eyes miss. A team led by J. van den Eijnden of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of…
A Generative View of Latent Structure Regression When scientists talk about latent structure, they’re usually describing ideas that exist behind the curtain of the data we can measure. The GFLSR paper from Clara Grazian of the University of Sydney and colleagues at UNSW, supported by the ARC Training Centre in Data Analytics for Resources and…
From Surfaces to Secrets: A Map of Cluster Algebras Mathematics loves to pretend it is a language with only straight lines and rigid rules, but in truth it is a grand playground where shapes, rhythms, and surprises mingle. The new work on unimodality and loop fence posets sits at the intersection of a beautiful web…
Meet FlexQ: A Six-Bit Quantization Breakthrough The team behind FlexQ hails from the Guangzhou Institute of Technology and Xidian University, with collaborators at CSEE, Hunan University. Led by Hao Zhang and Xin He, the work tackles a core bottleneck in AI today: how to run colossal language models on hardware that isn’t built for them….
What a shower sounds like when seen through a radio telescope Cosmic rays arrive from most directions with powers that baffle even the most patient observers. When they smash into Earth’s atmosphere, they unleash a cascade of secondary particles in a flash that lasts only a fraction of a second. For decades, scientists have watched…
Defect prediction gets a human face For decades, people have tried to forecast where software bugs will hide, usually by scanning code for telling fingerprints—the code metrics, churn rates, commit histories. The new work from researchers at the University of Tsukuba shifts the lens. Instead of treating defects as purely a code problem, they ask…
Can Video Tools Give AI the Patience to Reason? Long videos demand more than snapshots; they require memory, attention, and cross‑modal storytelling. A new wave of research is teaching AI how to reason through hours of footage, not just lines of text. The paper Thinking With Videos: Multimodal Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Long Video Reasoning,…
What memory could feel like if it stopped needing knobs In the modern data center, memory is the new electricity bill. The cost of keeping data close to the processors matters as much as the speed of the processors themselves. To stretch memory budgets, researchers have been layering different kinds of memory into tiers: fast…
A Map of Symmetries: Equivariant Loop Spaces Key idea tucked into a single sentence: when you poke at a space that carries a symmetry group, the way it loops back on itself can be organized by a special kind of algebra, the EV-operad, which respects every layer of symmetry at once. The paper by Branko…
Rethinking multitask learning: a bottleneck hidden in plain sight In the realm of artificial intelligence, more tasks often promise broader capabilities, but they also invite a stubborn escalation in compute. The transformers at the heart of today’s vision systems rely on attention mechanisms that compare every query to every key. When you scale up to…
Opening the choreography behind customer support When you dial a support line or open a help chat, you usually notice the answers you get not the careful choreography that tempered them. The best help feels effortless, almost inevitable, as if the agent knows your problem and your mood before you finish typing. A new study…
Highlights: A Toric Stage Inspires Interpolation; Most Low-Degree Points Emerge from Ambient Intersections; Singular Curves Go Onstage with Unity; A Plane-Curve Twist Expands Classical Results In the orchestra of algebraic geometry, a curve is a melody and a point of small degree is a note that repeats across a number field, not at will but…
Framing the Magnetic Shadow Around MRI In every hospital MRI suite, a powerful magnet sits at the room’s heart, quietly shaping how patients are scanned and how researchers peer into the body. The magnetic field isn’t confined to the bore; it spills into the surrounding space, creating a magnetic landscape that human bodies and metallic…
Seasonal Mystery of Muon Showers When the atmosphere hums with the heat of July, a quiet chorus travels underground: muons raining down from the sky, born in cosmic-ray showers high above. The NOvA Collaboration, working at Fermilab with researchers from around the world, has been watching a peculiar twist in that chorus. The rate at…
A doorway to a strange shape and the space where functions live Highlights: A geometry puzzle becomes a playground for new kinds of symmetry. Among the many wonders of higher-dimensional complex analysis, the Hartogs triangle △H sits in a curious corner: two complex dimensions, a shape defined by the simple inequality |z| < |w| <...
What autoformalization is and why it could matter Mathematics is a language with two dialects. The everyday speech we use to describe a problem is not the same as the precise, machine-checkable language used by proof assistants such as Lean, Coq, or Isabelle. Autoformalization is the project of teaching a computer to translate a natural…
Foundations Enter Pathology, Changing the Data Game Highlights: Big neural networks trained on unlabeled data can unlock delicate pathology tasks with far less labeled data. When you look at a whole slide image from a tumor tissue, you’re staring at a billion little pixels that tell a story—one that pathologists have learned to read through…
The face-off: AI versus rule-based scanners In the quiet, meticulous world of software security, two kinds of detectors keep watch over our code: the veteran static analyzers that run on rules, and the newer, flexible minds built from large language models. The former move like seasoned searchlights, scanning for known patterns of danger—SQL injections, hardcoded…