Do AGN winds teach galaxies to breathe and grow? In the heart of most galaxies sits a supermassive black hole, quietly feasting on gas until it erupts in an outflow that can sweep across thousands of light-years. For decades, astronomers have wrestled with a simple question: when these winds surge outward, do they snuff out…
The Perilous Dance of Autonomous Overtaking Autonomous vehicles are getting remarkably good at navigating complex environments. But even the most advanced self-driving systems still face a profound challenge: high-speed overtaking maneuvers. Imagine two Formula 1 cars, hurtling down a track at breakneck speed, poised for a wheel-to-wheel pass. The margin for error is minuscule; a…
The quest for truly secure communication in a quantum world is a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. Researchers are constantly devising new cryptographic methods, only to have clever adversaries find ways to exploit loopholes. This latest research from MIT, led by David Cui, Chirag Falor, Anand Natarajan, and Tina Zhang, tackles a fundamental challenge…
The hidden drama of many high-energy formulations isn’t in the chemistry alone but in the tiny corners where materials meet: the grain boundaries, the surfaces, the junctions where TNT, the infamous explosive, brushes up against HMX, another energetic crystal. A new modeling framework from researchers at Purdue University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Los…
Revolutionizing the Design of Optoelectronic Devices The world of electronics is on the brink of a revolution. We’re not just talking incremental improvements, but a fundamental shift in how we design and build the devices that power our lives. At the heart of this transformation lies the fascinating realm of two-dimensional (2D) materials, ultrathin substances…
The hushed urgency in a hospital room, the frantic search for answers when a patient reacts unexpectedly to medication—these are scenarios that highlight the critical need to detect adverse drug events (ADEs). ADEs are a significant source of preventable harm, and currently, identifying them relies heavily on painstaking manual review of patient records. But what…
Imagine a world where numbers don’t just add up, but *spread out* into sets. This isn’t some mathematical fantasy; it’s the realm of hyperfields, exotic structures that are quietly revolutionizing fields like algebraic geometry and matroid theory. Recently, a remarkable discovery has been made about these hyperfields, shedding light on their hidden order and potentially…
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…
In the world of distributed computing, speed is measured in two ways that rarely line up perfectly: how many rounds of communication you need (time) and how many messages you churn through (the bill for bandwidth, energy, and processing). For decades, researchers have chased near-optimal time with clever protocols, then separately chased tight message budgets…
Why Clinical Notes Are the Untapped Goldmine of Medicine Electronic health records (EHRs) are often thought of as databases filled with neat rows of lab results, medication lists, and billing codes. But the real story of a patient’s health is often buried in the free-form clinical notes — the detailed narratives doctors write to capture…