What goofy transformations are and why they matter Highlights: A newly explored idea in quantum field theory challenges what counts as a symmetry. Instead of a traditional symmetry that mirrors a faithful, unbroken pattern in the equations, goofy transformations flirt with sign flips in the kinetic terms. Yet they can lock in stable relationships between…
In the world of real time optimization, engineers chase the best operating point for sprawling systems—think power grids, supply chains, and even the algorithms that steer your favorite apps. The catch is simple and stubborn: you rarely know the full map from input to output. You only glimpse a sliver of it through measurements, and…
Cosmology is now a dialogue between the very large and the very small. The universe is expanding and accelerating, a fact that pushes physicists to ask how a quantum theory of gravity could accommodate a cosmos like ours. Among the big questions is whether string theory—our leading candidate for a quantum theory of gravity—can produce…
In the business of Islamic finance, a quiet revolution is taking shape not in the form of flashy new instruments, but in a smarter way to distribute profits when two or more parties join forces. A team of researchers from ENSIIE and the Laboratoire de Mathématiques et Modélisation d’Evry (LaMME) at Université Évry Paris-Saclay has…
The world has fallen in love with AI art, but loving it often comes with a dare: you have to learn a strange dialect of prompts, pipelines, and knobs that feel more like coding than painting. GenFlow aims to flip that script. Born from researchers at the University of Science, Vietnam National University in Ho…
Robotics has long carried two visions at once: a scientist’s dream of learning from data, and an engineer’s wish to respect the stubborn reality of hardware. For humanoid robots, that hardware often looks like a tangle of joints, cables, and belts rather than a clean line from motor to foot. In practice, many learning systems…
The cosmic X-ray background is the faint, diffuse glow that blankets the sky in X-rays, a celestial sunrise stitched together from the hearts of galaxies. Most of that glow comes from active galactic nuclei, the hungry cores of galaxies where matter rushes into supermassive black holes and their violent appetites fuel light across the spectrum….
When scientists talk about computing with light, they’re often chasing speed, energy efficiency, and a kind of hardware that behaves like a brain without the fragility of silicon. The newest twist in that quest comes from a collaboration spanning the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Maryland, Princeton University, and the University of Cambridge. The…
In the whirl of a city’s daily traffic, cameras don’t just capture chaos; they catalogue patterns. Most systems for watching video learn what normal looks like and flag anything that strays. But anomalies aren’t always dramatic plot twists. They hide in subtle pockets of a scene, a motion that refuses to conform, or a glimpse…
The Puzzle of Perfect Approximation At the heart of mathematics lies a deceptively simple question: how well can we approximate real numbers by rational ones? This question, which echoes through centuries of mathematical thought, is the essence of Diophantine approximation. It’s about finding integer solutions that come tantalizingly close to hitting a target defined by…
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,…
The digital world is a chaotic symphony of clicking, scrolling, and typing. We navigate it effortlessly, yet for artificial intelligence, even the simplest tasks can feel like scaling Mount Everest. A team of researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Xiamen University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and other leading institutions across China…
In the world of voice that sounds human, the measure of quality has always felt like a human-scale endeavor. Mean Opinion Score, MOS, has long ruled the roost as the gold standard for judging how clean, natural, and pleasant a piece of speech sounds. Yet MOS demands human listeners, time, and careful setup. That makes…
Intro Cybersecurity often feels like a high-stakes game of chess played on a sprawling, ever-changing board. Defenders patch holes, monitor traffic, and chase down elusive weaknesses, while attackers scout for the tiniest misstep to exploit. For decades, penetration testing has been a human-led craft: security experts map a network, probe forms, test credentials, and chase…
Background: the city’s pulse and the lure of quantum thinking Cities don’t speak in neat, tidy plots. They buzz with hundreds of tiny rhythms: mass transit kicking into gear, cafe lines swelling on sunny afternoons, crowds dissolving into evening quiet as people drift home. Telecommunication signals—SMS bursts, call bursts, data pings—are a kind of urban…
The Hidden Motives Behind Coherent Spaces Georg Lehner’s new work on algebraic K-theory of coherent spaces invites readers to meet a surprising team: abstract spaces that look tiny on the surface, yet encode wild arithmetic below. The central claim is deceptively simple: to understand deep invariants of categories of sheaves on these spaces, you might…
The world of matrices is a world of rules that stubbornly resist cramming into a single sentence. A team of mathematicians from the University at Buffalo and the University of Zagreb has asked a deceptively simple question about those rules: what happens when you squeeze the spectrum of a matrix and demand that certain structural…
Peering Through the Haze: The Promise of Synthetic Aperture Radar Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a remarkable technology. Unlike ordinary cameras that rely on visible light, SAR uses radio waves to create images. This means it can ‘see’ through clouds, rain, and even darkness—a game-changer for everything from disaster response to mapping remote regions. But…
The latest study of how developers actually use ChatGPT in the wild peels back the glamour and shows the rough edges that still matter when AI tries to help write code. It’s not a manifesto about AI replacing programmers; it’s a map of where a chatty large language model can accelerate software work—and where it…
The challenge of finding a needle in a digital haystack grows bigger when the haystack is a book-length document. Traditional search engines stumble as documents swell beyond a few screens, forcing compromises between speed and accuracy. In information retrieval, researchers have tried to teach machines to skim and weigh words the way we do, but…