The universe keeps a few stubborn secrets in its pocket: the densest matter, the fastest spins, and the kind of energy that can light up entire galaxies for a moment in time. Neutron stars sit right at the crossroads of all three. They’re city-sized bundles of neutrons packed so tightly that a sugar-cube amount would…
In a quiet corner of the quantum world, a handful of ultracold polar molecules dance to an unusual tune. The trick is microwave shielding: a highly elliptic microwave field makes the long-range attraction between molecules behave as if they were bound in one dimension. The result is a surprisingly clean, almost architectural set of bound…
Smartphones have quietly become the first line of personal health sensing for millions. A quick glance at the data stream from your pocket can feel almost magical: a graph of heartbeats captured simply by placing a finger on the back camera. Yet behind the promise lies a stubborn problem: different phone models, camera sensors, lighting,…
The study behind this piece comes from a collaboration involving Fujitsu Research’s Quantum Laboratory and Data & Security Laboratory, plus the Institute of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Tsukuba. The lead authors include Kaito Kishi, Junpei Yamaguchi, Tetsuya Izu, and Noboru Kunihiro. In plain terms, the team built and tested quantum circuits…
When you flip through a sequence of AI-generated images, you expect the same character to show up again and again—the same face, the same hat, the same mood. Yet in practice, even the best image engines drift. A character who appears in one frame as a confident, sunlit portrait can look subtly different in the…
In causal claims, the chain from cause to effect is only as strong as what we leave out. Economists have long wrestled with omitted-variable bias, the dreaded specter that lurks when a relevant factor isn’t observed or controlled. Across dozens, then hundreds, of studies, researchers have relied on sensitivity analyses to ask: how robust are…
The Challenge of Visualizing Supercomputer Data Imagine a bustling city, its streets teeming with vehicles representing computing jobs, each vying for access to limited resources. That’s the complex landscape of supercomputer queue data – a rich source of information but also a tangled web of variables and processes. Scientists, machine learning researchers, and system maintainers…
When the push to train ever larger AI models shifts toward spreading the work across many devices and centers, the instinct is simple: more workers should shave off the time it takes to reach a good solution. In practice, though, the network tends to be the slowest muscle on the body. Data must travel back…
What the study is chasing and why it matters Every data point in an epidemic is like a page in a diary that was only partly written. Some chapters are easy to read because people are tested, counted, and logged. Others are missing or murky, because not all infections show up in numbers, or because…
The rhythm of the natural world isn’t a single drumbeat but a chorus of patterns that slip and slide between order and surprise. Turbulent air, convective storms, rainfall bursts, even the flicker of financial markets—these are all places where systems swing between calm and chaos in ways that look random until you pause to notice…
Artificial intelligence that can reason about actions and change is a hunter for real-world autonomy. From robots gripping objects to delivery fleets plotting routes, the ability to plan is what keeps AI from merely reacting to the present and instead shaping a reliable path toward the future. A team at IBM Research—Harsha Kokel, Michael Katz,…
The lab’s hum is almost musical: a whisper-soft reflection of light against a tiny semiconductor that houses a single, stubbornly quantum spin. In the best experiments, observing something as simple as a reflected photon becomes a doorway into the heart of a quantum system. This new work from Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, and the Centre de…
In the noisy, high-stakes world of nuclear physics, detectors are more than sensors. They’re tremulous listeners that emit streams of tiny signals when atoms rearrange, ions crash, or photons whisper from a gamma-ray shower. The critical trick is not just catching a single flash accurately, but handling thousands of signals in parallel, every nanosecond counting….
When we dream about machines that can read minds, the conversation often skims the surface of science fiction. Yet a new paper from an international team dares to step into that territory with unusual clarity and a wink of provocation. The authors claim to have built an AI that passes two classic tests of Theory…
The Psychological Distance Problem We face a curious paradox. We know climate change is a looming catastrophe, yet many of us struggle to act. The reason, according to new research from the University of Toronto, might lie in something called “psychological distance.” This isn’t about physical distance, but rather the way our brains process information…
Could a Pocket Robot Quietly Calm a Kid’s Heart? Meet the pocket healer: a robot designed to relax with touch In the paper by Morten Roed Frederiksen, Kasper Stoy, and Maja Matarić, researchers set out to test whether a pocket sized companion could nudge a child toward calm in the moment. The aim is simple…
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…
Radiology sits at the quiet edge of a medical emergency, a grayscale diary that chronicles what the body is doing at a moment in time. For the kidneys, those moments are often dense with subtle signs: a tiny cyst here, an exophytic nodule there, an attenuation value that can tilt a diagnosis one way or…
The cosmos may be harboring a quiet handshake between its two most mysterious components, dark matter and dark energy. A new study proposes a mechanism that keeps the background expansion exactly as in the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, but allows the two dark components to exchange energy at the level of tiny fluctuations….
Cancer isn’t a single monolith so much as a chorus of molecular disruptions that ripple through DNA, RNA, proteins, and beyond. To understand it, researchers increasingly profile patients across multiple molecular layers—DNA methylation, gene expression, microRNA, and more—hoping to stitch together a holistic portrait. Yet in the real world, data from some layers are often…