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…
Imagine a world where the seemingly chaotic crumpling of a sheet of paper reveals deep truths about the shape of space itself. This isn’t the stuff of science fiction, but the heart of a mathematical field called singularity theory. And Koki Iwakura, at Kyushu University’s Joint Graduate School of Mathematics for Innovation, is pushing its…
Wormholes have always hovered between science and myth—the imagined tunnels through spacetime that could, in principle, connect distant regions of the cosmos. A new study from the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Travis Rippentrop, Avijit Bera, and Mustapha Ishak, digs into a pressing question behind that science-fiction gloss: can these thin-walled bridges stay…
Light has a way of surprising us just when we think we’ve cornered it. Spontaneous emission—the quiet habit of an excited quantum system shedding energy by emitting a photon—has long been a bedrock idea in quantum optics. Yet in many real materials the first excited state isn’t a tidy rung on a ladder. It’s a…
Electronic health records (EHRs) are the lifeblood of modern medicine, containing a patient’s complete medical history. But these records are often messy, inconsistent, and riddled with jargon – making it tough for doctors to quickly find the information they need. Now, researchers at Tsinghua University have developed a new AI system, DR.EHR, that promises to…
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…
A New Era in Metasurface Design Imagine a world where we can design materials that perfectly absorb light at specific frequencies, like a perfectly tuned musical instrument. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the promise of advanced metasurfaces, incredibly thin structures that manipulate light in unprecedented ways. But designing these tiny, intricate structures to achieve this…
Biometric security feels like magic at first glance: a fingerprint that unlocks a phone, an iris scan that logs you into a car, a face that replaces a password. But the real story is messier and more human. Behind every smooth unlock is a constant balancing act between convenience, privacy, and the risk that data…
The doctor’s office of the future might feel a lot like a digital detective agency. Patients arrive with a cascade of symptoms, and the AI assistant, armed with vast medical knowledge and the ability to interpret everything from X-rays to lab reports, needs to piece together the puzzle. But how do we train these AI…
Imagine a clockwork universe, exquisitely intricate, where the gears are not physical but mathematical—a universe governed by polynomial equations. For over a century, mathematicians have wrestled with a seemingly simple question within this universe: how many stable, repeating patterns (limit cycles) can exist in a system described by planar polynomial equations of a given degree?…
Why Feeling Matters More Than Seeing for Robots Robots opening doors, pulling drawers, or twisting knobs might sound like a mundane chore, but it’s a surprisingly complex dance of touch, prediction, and adaptation. At the heart of this challenge is the robot’s ability to understand and manipulate objects that aren’t rigid or fixed — things…
The invisible art of code completion Every programmer knows the magic moment when their IDE (Integrated Development Environment) guesses the next word or function they want to type. This seemingly simple feature—code completion—is a lifeline for developers, speeding up typing, reducing errors, and helping navigate sprawling codebases. But behind this magic lies a complex challenge:…
Theoretical physics often feels like trying to read the genome of reality in a language that shifts shape when you blink. Planar N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills (SYM) is one of those languages: exquisitely symmetric, shockingly intricate, and textually full of hidden patterns. In this landscape, a method called Separation of Variables (SoV) promises to…
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?…
Medical imaging is a cornerstone of modern healthcare, but interpreting images can be slow and subjective. For abdominal scans, the gold standard is often a laborious, manual process, prone to errors in consistency. Now, a new benchmark study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, led by Deepa Krishnaswamy and Cosmin Ciausu, has evaluated the most promising…
Why Teaching AI to Reason Is More Than Getting the Right Answer Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT and its peers have dazzled us with their ability to generate text, solve math problems, and even write code. But beneath the surface, these models often struggle with a subtle yet crucial skill: understanding which parts of…
The Surprising Power of Tailored Data Imagine building a house. You wouldn’t use the same materials for the foundation as you would for the roof, right? Similarly, training powerful AI models shouldn’t rely on a generic data dump. A new study from researchers at Apple, the University of Washington, and Stanford shows that carefully matching…
The hunt for planets beyond our solar system rides on tiny, almost invisible nudges from starlight. Astronomers measure a star’s wobble—its radial velocity (RV)—to infer a planet’s presence, mass, and orbit. Over the past decades, template-based RV methods have become a central tool for turning a spectrum into a velocity signal, especially for cooler stars…
In the realm of formal mathematics, computers prove theorems by following carefully crafted steps called tactics. When proofs grow long and tangled, researchers imagine a smarter way to reuse patterns—the software-library mindset applied to reasoning itself. The idea sounds almost like teaching a machine not just to solve a single puzzle, but to learn how…
Two devices walk into a shared space, not with radios blinking or screens flashing, but with motion, position, and posture. The message is encoded not in a waveform but in the way the sender changes its own state, whether by location, speed, or orientation. The observer, a distant sensor or camera, reads those changes and…