Orion Alliance Brings Disaster-Proof Consensus to Geo-Scale Clouds In a world where our most critical services ride on networks that stretch across oceans, a regional blackout or a cyberattack can feel existential. Data centers aren’t just banks of machines; they are the nervous system of modern life, and when one node shudders, the whole system…
In the quest to wire quantum devices into a global network, researchers are chasing a different kind of certainty than the usual. They want to know when a network’s correlations are truly quantum, not just clever facsimiles produced by hidden classical cards. A new study from Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, led by Ming-Xing Luo…
Artificial intelligence has made astonishing leaps by learning patterns from vast oceans of data. Yet when you push it to reason—to derive new conclusions from a few rules, or to check a complex chain of thought—the cracks start to show. A team at Google DeepMind led by András György, Tor Lattimore, Nevena Lazić, and Csaba…
When people imagine AI thinking, they often picture long, careful chains of thoughts sprawling across text. In practice, the most capable systems today are data-hungry monoliths that bend their will to huge corpora and massive compute, with reasoning often leaking out in the form of vague patterns rather than transparent steps. A new study from…
In labs that feel like kinetic art installations, a thin 2D sea of microtubules is energised by molecular motors and set to spin into patterns that baffle our everyday intuition about fluids. This is active matter, a realm where tiny, self-propelled bits push and pull one another until the whole system behaves like a living,…
Could a geometric whisper reveal the universe’s hidden symmetries? In a field where space, symmetry and motion braid into a single language, mathematicians ask a deceptively simple question: can we pick a natural way to differentiate shapes that also respects the rules of symplectic geometry—the mathematical theater where positions and momenta dance together? The paper…
The circle group is more than a pretty metaphor for a clock face. It’s a compact, beloved stage for ideas at the heart of algebra, analysis and topology. On that stage, points sit around a circle, and sequences of integers push those points along, sometimes nudging them toward zero, sometimes nudging them away. In a…
We live in a world awash in data. From the mundane details of our daily commutes to the intimate specifics of our health, digital trails follow our every move. But this wealth of information carries a hefty price: the erosion of personal privacy. The tension between useful data analysis and individual privacy is a constant…
In the growing chorus of artificial intelligence that can describe a photo, translate a caption, or answer a riddle about a chart, a stubborn question keeps echoing: can these systems really combine multiple skills at once, or do they stumble when the task demands several abilities at the same time? It’s a bit like asking…
Budgeting for a year of conferences, trips, or family plans is a ritual of estimation and compromise. You sketch rough costs for flights, hotels, and registrations, then you improvise as receipts arrive and prices wobble. A new study turns this everyday uncertainty into a mathematics of decision making. It asks a deceptively simple question: if…
The puzzle of the superpermutation has long sounded like a carnival trick in the world of combinatorics: a single string that somehow contains all possible orders of n distinct symbols as substrings. It sounds almost magical, until you realize that the problem isn’t just a parlor game for theorists; it touches encoding, data compression, and…
The night sky isn’t just a tapestry of twinkling points. It’s a library of stories about how stars live, die, and pass on their secrets to one another. One of the most intriguing chapters is written by carbon stars—stars whose atmospheres harbor more carbon than oxygen, a signature that usually points to deep nuclear alchemy…
Quantum Weirdness Meets Classical Limits Quantum mechanics has a knack for defying our classical intuitions. One of its most baffling features is nonlocality: the ability of two distant particles to exhibit correlations so strong that no classical explanation without communication can reproduce them. This phenomenon, famously highlighted by Bell’s theorem, is not just a philosophical…
Imagine squeezing the entire mass of our Sun into a sphere the size of a city. That’s a neutron star, one of the densest objects in the universe. For decades, these stellar remnants have been cosmic laboratories, challenging our understanding of matter under extreme conditions. But what if what we thought were neutron stars… aren’t?…
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 Quiet Geometry Hidden in Noise and Porosity Highlights A new way to think about where curves live inside space; coarse tangent fields tie together large-scale structure with small-scale detail; dimension bounds link geometry to Nagata and Assouad dimensions; porous planar sets acquire simple tangent directions; a counterexample maps the limits of L2-type estimates. This…
In the quiet, humming world of quantum cryptography, the dream is simple: a group of people should share a secret that no one—not even a boundless computer—can crack. The physics of light and information promises that kind of security, but the real world isn’t perfectly quiet. Noise, lost signals, and finite data can turn a…
A new defense for artificial intelligence systems aims to do something almost magical: guard against two very different kinds of deception at once. On the one hand, adversarial examples turn ordinary inputs into sneaky misdirections by barely perceptible nudges. On the other hand, backdoor attacks plant hidden triggers that flip a model’s behavior on command….
The socket is the intimate interface between a person’s residual limb and their prosthetic leg. It’s where comfort, control, and daily life hinge. And yet the way a socket is shaped is still largely a craft, perfected by clinicians who adjust plaster casts or digital scans with tactile intuition and years of experience. The new…
Massive stars rarely lead solitary lives. In the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy with a tiny metal content, astronomers have a natural laboratory where stellar duets can be studied in exquisite detail. The environment’s metal paucity means winds are weaker and the life stories of giant stars are written in binary ink. A…