The universe speaks in ripples, and sometimes those ripples arrive with a complicated rhythm. Gravitational waves from spiraling binaries are the loudest chorus we hear, but when the two compact objects trace an eccentric path, the melody breaks into many notes. The new work from the Instituto de Física Teórica UAM/CSIC in Madrid, led by…
In the quiet world of completely locked-in state, the body becomes a sealed chamber and the mind longs for a conversation it can no longer physically initiate. ALS can strip away not just speech or movement but the very channels through which a person can reach out to others. At The University of Texas at…
When researchers peek at the vast universe of all possible rules that could relate a handful of items, they often discover that the most famous ideas travel across boundaries—from pure math to computer science to everyday intuition. A recent study by Rudolf Berghammer of Kiel, Jules Desharnais of Université Laval, and Michael Winter of Brock…
Imagine teaching a robot to perform a simple task, like stacking blocks. You show it a few examples, and it clumsily tries to mimic your movements. Now, imagine the lighting changes, or the camera angle shifts slightly. Suddenly, the robot is completely lost, its carefully learned skills vanishing like a mirage. This frustrating scenario highlights…
Imagine trying to drive in a city where the road signs are faded, the lane markings are more like suggestions, and the map in your car is… well, let’s just say it was last updated when dial-up internet was still a thing. That’s the reality that self-driving cars often face. They rely on high-definition (HD)…
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…
Imagine a self-driving car navigating a bustling city street. It needs to understand not just the location of other vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, but also their movement, intentions, and relationships to each other. This is a complex problem of spatial reasoning, requiring the car to process massive amounts of data in real-time. Recent advances in…
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,…
In the quiet world of fluids, mixing is one of the oldest, messiest problems. Diffusion — the slow, patient random jiggle of molecules — loves to drag its feet. Advection, the grand stirring motion of a flow, can speed things up, but engineers and mathematicians have long faced a stubborn question: can we make mixing…
Spin glasses are not just magnets. They’re a laboratory for exploring how chaos can carve order from randomness. In the quiet mathematics of mean-field models, the energy landscape is imagined as a forest of valleys and plateaus, a structure that feels almost familial: nested valleys within valleys, a tree-like organization that physicists and mathematicians have…
Regulation isn’t a dirty word in the land of machines. It’s the quiet patience behind any system that keeps spinning when the world throws a curveball. The classic idea from cybernetics—the Every Good Regulator Theorem—asks a plain question: can the regulator hold a system steady by mirroring enough of its inner workings? The paper by…
When you compress a polynomial into a tiny circuit, you’re effectively packing a weather map of calculations into a pocket-sized blueprint. The punchline isn’t merely that the map exists, but that its hidden weather — the factors you’d peel apart to read it — can be read in the same compact language. In other words,…
In the race to render photorealistic scenes at interactive speeds, the shape of a single bounding box can decide whether a scene feels instant or stuttery. Real-time ray tracing hinges on a data structure called a bounding volume hierarchy, or BVH, to decide quickly which objects a ray might hit. The tighter the bounding volumes,…
Language models have learned to read a room-sized wall of text with the ease of whispering to a friend. They can answer questions, summarize stories, or complete sentences that follow from a prompt. Yet two stubborn realities remain: prompting is powerful but expensive at run time, and fine-tuning the model’s knobs is memory-heavy, risky, and…
Big questions from a sea of data In the dream of physics, you don’t need a telescope or a collider for every answer. Sometimes you just need the patience to wait for a smell of truth in the data and the nerve to ask the right questions. The paper we’re exploring does exactly that for…
The Unexpected Pitfalls of Multivariate Regression Imagine building a complex machine, adding more and more intricate parts to improve its function. Sometimes, this leads to greater efficiency and power. But sometimes, the added complexity creates unforeseen problems, causing the machine to malfunction. A new study from the University of Iowa, led by Associate Professor Joyee…
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 tiny stage is a metal surface, the performer a single electron spin pinned to a defect or molecule, and the spotlight is an electric field that can coax the spin to dance. In this world, researchers aren’t just watching quantum quirks; they’re designing the choreography with electric pulses, no magnetic coils required. The paper…
Curricula are more than a checklist of courses. They are living maps of how a university whispers from one topic to the next, from introductory ideas to the frontier edges of a discipline. A pair of researchers from Caltech and Georgia Tech have given us a new vocabulary for reading that map, revealing its shape…
Finding Order in the Unlabeled Chaos In the vast ocean of data, one of the most fundamental tasks is to separate the signal from the noise—to distinguish between groups or clusters hidden within the data. Traditionally, this requires knowing which data points belong to which group, a luxury often unavailable in real-world scenarios. But what…