The Large Hadron Collider never runs out of surprises, and this time the surprise wears a tiny, fast-moving cloak: charm quarks. These are heavy enough to be born in the initial hammer blows of a proton–proton collision, and light enough to be cradled into ordinary hadrons within the blink of a detector’s eye. In the…
Rethinking AI Serving at a Massive Scale Large language models (LLMs) like GPT and its successors have dazzled us with their ability to generate text, answer questions, and even write code. But behind the scenes, running these models at scale is a monumental engineering challenge. The latest research from Huawei’s xDeepServe team, published in 2025,…
The cosmos we inhabit is astonishingly uniform on large scales, yet the whispers of subtle irregularities still echo through the data. The standard story—that space is, for all practical purposes, the same in all directions and at all places—rests on Einstein’s theory of gravity and the simple, elegant FLRW model. But physicists love to poke…
Imagine a tangled fishing line, a chaotic mess of loops and crossings. Now, imagine that same line, but in four dimensions. This seemingly abstract scenario is the heart of a new mathematical breakthrough that’s upending our understanding of knots and the very fabric of higher-dimensional space. Researchers at North Carolina State University, Swarthmore College, and…
High in the ladder of abstraction, mathematics sometimes feels like mapping weather on a planet we can barely glimpse. You’re looking at a landscape made of equations, curves, and angles, and yet the real drama happens behind the scenes. For a certain class of geometric shapes called projective hypersurfaces, the weather is written in derivatives:…
Intro In the long arc of physics, symmetry often behaves like a governing instinct — it tells us what can exist without tipping the universe into chaos. A new line of thinking about quantum geometry leans into that instinct, asking a deceptively simple question: what are the low-energy, or infrared, possibilities for a particular kind…
On the surface, counting substrings seems like a dusty corner of theoretical computer science—the sort of puzzle you expect to be solved with clever tricks and careful bookkeeping. But the paper counting distinct (non-)crossing substrings by Umezaki, Shibata, Köppl, Nakashima, Inenaga, and Bannai from Kyushu University and collaborators reframes this classic task as a lens…
The dream of self driving cars hinges on more than clever sensors and slick dashboards. It rests on a quiet, stubborn challenge: how do we test a system that learns from oceans of data, across three big fronts called intelligent cockpits, autonomous driving, and roadside networks? The traditional path has been to gather huge libraries…
Light carries a chorus of harmonics, like a musical chorus that can be shifted to higher notes. For engineers building tiny optical circuits, tuning that chorus used to mean turning a dial or threading a temperature knob. But those methods are slow at the scale of modern photonics. A team at Queens College and The…
Quantum physics tends to feel like a language spoken in a quiet, exacting dialect of mathematics. Yet every so often a study comes along that makes the alphabet itself seem pliable, almost musical. A recent line of work from researchers at the University of Burgos and collaborators in La Plata, Argentina, does just that. They…
The family of two‑dimensional materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides has long teased potential—from ultra-thin transistors to solar cells and beyond. MoS2, in particular, rose to prominence because it combines the elegance of a atomically thin sheet with a usable bandgap and surprising mechanical strength. But the dream of turning MoS2 into a perfectly tuned…
Imagine a world where translating between any two languages is as effortless as a casual conversation. That’s the ultimate goal driving researchers in the field of natural language processing (NLP), a quest complicated by the sheer number of languages spoken around the globe—over 7,000, to be exact. The Language Barrier: A Mountain to Climb Current…
The sky isn’t a static mural but a living atlas, a sea of data where every star is a data point and every movement a clue. Gaia, the European Space Agency’s ambitious chart of the Milky Way, is mapping roughly two billion stars with a precision so tiny it would be invisible to the naked…
Disorder and waves have an uneasy relationship. In everyday life, a muddy room muffles sound and makes it hard for a whisper to travel. In quantum materials, randomness can trap electrons, a phenomenon known as Anderson localization. For a long time, physicists have understood that in one- and two-dimensional systems, any amount of uncorrelated disorder…
The internet is built from tiny, fast-moving fragments. IPv4 fragments, IPv6 fragments, and TCP segments are like torn pages that arrive out of order, and every receiving stack has to piece them back together into a coherent story. But what happens if two pieces overlap, or if the same data shows up a little differently…
When you ask a modern language model to solve a problem, you’re not just asking it for a number or a neat sentence. You’re inviting it to chain thoughts, weigh possibilities, and land on an answer that feels right. Yet the way the problem is framed—the style of reasoning you encourage the model to use—can…
Unraveling the Spin Mystery of Strange Particles In the vast subatomic theater where protons and nuclei collide at near-light speeds, particles emerge in a chaotic dance. Among these are hyperons—particles containing strange quarks—that have long puzzled physicists with their unexpected spin behavior. The LHCb collaboration at CERN has recently taken a fresh look at this…
In the tangled world of graphs, backbones are everything. They’re the lean, fast routes that hold a city together even when you prune away the frills. The snag is that not all backbones are created equal: some prioritize keeping distances short, others chase cheapness, and sometimes the most expensive links are the ones that unlock…
In mathematics, researchers sometimes borrow a familiar map and aim it at a wild, alien landscape. Guirardel and Perin take the well-trodden idea of an algebraic group and ask a bold question: what happens when the field is replaced by a group, specifically a torsion-free hyperbolic group? The answer, surprisingly orderly, reads like a structural…
When a robot crawls through a collapsed warehouse or a smoke-filled office, it sees nothing but geometry and noise. Humans glimpse a map of rooms and relationships; a plan, a story, a way to navigate danger. Pix2G is a furniture-ready translation device for machines, turning raw pixels and lidar echoes into a human-scale map—a semantic,…