Video compression has always been a guessing game between how little you can store and how good the picture looks when you pull it back. The newest twist flips the coin: instead of storing a movie frame as a mosaic of pixels, you train a tiny neural network to learn how to draw the scene…
In the quiet corridors of ETH Zurich, a nanoparticle floats in a laser trap, its tiny motion monitored not by peering through a detector and reading out a signal, but by letting light itself carry the control signal back to the particle. This experiment is a striking demonstration of measurement-free coherent feedback, a concept at…
Numbers don’t just sit there on a page; they strut with personality, stubbornness, and the occasional flourish of mystery. In the quiet world of number theory, researchers chase patterns that feel like fingerprints of the universe, tiny clues about why certain arithmetic rules bend the way they do. A new study from the Indian Institute…
In a square lattice built from tiny magnetic rods, light is not merely a wave; it’s a traveler navigating a city laid out by symmetry and magnetism. The traveler’s routes aren’t dictated only by the bulk of the material but by the way the city is cut and rearranged. A new study from Nanyang Technological…
In the physics of many particles, energy and entropy often behave like faithful dancers who know their steps: scale with the number of dancers, N, in clean, predictable ways. In short-range systems, doubling the crowd doubles the energy, roughly speaking. But if the dancers are linked by long-range choreography, every dancer can feel every other…
In the quiet world of Brownian motion, a gas of tiny particles usually behaves like a crowd of independent wanderers. They bump and jitter, but each one is its own storyteller. In a new twist, researchers let the environment itself wobble in time, and suddenly the crowd starts to move as a chorus rather than…
Hydrogen is the simplest atom, and yet the trimer H3+ is one of the most stubbornly rich molecules in physics. It sits at the crossroads of fundamental quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, and the chemistry of the cosmos. For decades, scientists have pursued ever more precise calculations of its rovibrational energy levels—the tiny quantum states that govern…
In the realm of biology and medicine, researchers build elegant, pocket-sized maps of how substances travel through the body or how a disease spreads through a network of compartments. These are not sprawling encyclopedias but compact recipes that help predict what happens when you inject a drug, or when a nutrient shifts from blood to…
The universe of string theory is often pictured as a permeable ladder: a tower of echoes, each rung a heavier, more intricate vibration of the same underlying string. Yet for all the beauty of that image, the ladder can feel almost unruly—an endless attic of states whose organization isn’t obvious at first glance. A new…
The mathematics of symmetry is rarely tidy. It bleeds into physics, geometry, and even the way we model information. In the last decade, a thriving language has emerged to capture these ideas: vertex operator algebras, or VOAs. These objects sit at the crossroads of two-dimensional conformal field theory, string theory, and deep algebraic structures. They’re…
Gravitational waves have turned the cosmos into a kind of orchestra, where the dirge of collapsing stars and the hush of spacetime murmurs carry stories we can hear only through precise detectors and careful theory. In the latest turn of that story, a team led by Alejandra Gonzalez, with collaborators from across Europe and North…
In a world where smartphones, wearables, and cameras are always online, the AI powering everyday apps often lives far away in the cloud. The distance between you and your data center isn’t just measured in miles; it’s measured in milliseconds of delay, the jitter of a flaky connection, and the energy it takes to ferry…
Bayesian statistics often feels like a delicate negotiation between what we already know and what the data will reveal. The priors are the first step in that conversation, the beliefs you bring to a model before you even glimpse the numbers. When those priors are well-chosen, the data can sing in tune with them; when…
Black Holes Aren’t Just Cosmic Vacuum Cleaners At the heart of nearly every massive galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole, a gravitational beast millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. But these cosmic giants don’t just sit quietly—they feast on gas and dust swirling around them, creating some of the brightest beacons…
The math world often wears its ideas on the wall like a diagram with arrows and boxes. But when you step back, you discover that the real drama happens not in the bold strokes but in the subtle tremors along the edges. This is especially true when we study how a shape as familiar as…
On the surface, the world of rings and modules can feel like a museum of abstract curiosities—objects, maps, and constraints that drift far from everyday life. Yet a new paper from IIT Bombay, led by Tony J. Puthenpurakal, reveals a striking pattern hiding in the shadows: certain counts that measure how algebraic objects interact start…
Control is a tricky business for AI models. They can learn clever patterns, but a sudden gust of data can push them past their comfort zone. In real machines—think autonomous drones, industrial robots, or energy grids—the cost of a misstep isn’t just a misprediction; it can be a safety risk or a costly shutdown. The…
Imagine two particles, born together in a high-energy collision, so deeply intertwined that they share a single destiny, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. We’ve long known their fates are linked in terms of properties like spin — a fundamental quantum property somewhat analogous to a tiny internal compass needle. But what if this eerie…
Symmetry isn’t just about pretty patterns in wallpaper or snowflakes. In mathematics, symmetry is a precise language that encodes how many ways you can shuffle a system without changing its essential shape. The objects behind this language are called finite groups, and they come with a catalog of elements that behave in specific, rule-bound ways….
What this study sideslipped into our view of light on graphene Light on a graphene sheet isn’t just a pretty picture. It’s a tiny, fast-moving partner that can record, sense, and route signals at scales far smaller than the wavelengths we normally associate with optics. But graphene’s surface waves—called surface plasmon polaritons or SPPs—are notoriously…