A wild algebra reveals the secret of symmetry

In the language of pure math, symmetry is not a decorative flourish but a guiding compass. A new study led by D. Zhangazinova and A. Naurazbekova of L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University in Astana, with U. Umirbaev of Wayne State University and the Institute of Mathematics and Mathematical Modeling in Almaty, explores a daring…

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Who Holds the Keys to Accessible Prototyping Futures

Design happens at the intersection of imagination and interface. The moment of prototyping is where an idea begins to take shape as something others can test, critique, and adopt. But the tools designers rely on—digital canvases, low-fidelity mockups, whiteboards, or paper sketches—carry invisible assumptions about who is allowed to speak up, what senses can be…

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A Harmonic Polynomial Vanishes on a Cube’s Skeleton

A Harmonic Polynomial Vanishes on a Cube’s Skeleton Harmonic functions are the quiet workhorses of potential theory: heat, gravity, and electrical fields blend into smooth, source-free shapes that obey Laplace’s equation. Their zeros—the places where the function hits zero—often feel like the hidden skeletons of these fields, revealing where a system can settle into calm…

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A Hidden Half-Quantized Hall Emerges in Altermagnets

The world of magnets is full of familiar headlines: ferromagnets with a neat alignment of spins, or antiferromagnets where neighboring spins cancel each other out. But a recent theoretical peek into a class of materials called altermagnets—specifically a two-dimensional version dressed with dx2−y2 symmetry—adds a striking twist. The study, conducted by researchers at Clemson University…

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Triangles of Light Map the Cosmic Web

The universe isn’t a smooth ocean of galaxies. It’s more like a vast, lopsided foam of filaments, knots, and empty pockets—a cosmic web stitched together by gravity over billions of years. Our best map of that web comes not from directly seeing matter, but from watching how light is absorbed as it travels to us….

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A Fictitious Magnetic Field Lives in Moiré Materials

Moiré materials, where two atomic lattices slide past one another with a tiny twist, have become laboratories for exotic quantum behavior. In systems like twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) and twisted bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), electrons don’t just move through a static landscape; they wander through a textured, shimmering tapestry that remixes their quantum states…

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Can AI harvest randomness from ordinary RF noise today?

Entropy is the secret sauce of secure computing. It’s the unpredictable spice that makes cryptographic keys hard to guess and simulations believable. In the real world, though, harvesting high-quality randomness is surprisingly hard, especially on tiny devices that live on the edge of the network. The usual suspects—quantum devices, elaborate RF receivers, or lab-grade hardware—are…

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