The entanglement entropy you’ve heard about is a way to measure how tangled quantum systems are with each other. It’s a concept that has lit up discussions in quantum field theory, quantum gravity, and holography. But when you bring gauge symmetry into the picture—think of electromagnetism, or the color forces of quantum chromodynamics—the usual recipe…
Two-dimensional shifts of finite type are like sprawling mosaics where each tile carries a rule about its neighbors. The math of these systems is famously slippery: local constraints produce global patterns, and two seemingly different viewpoints can describe the same dynamical universe in surprising ways. In a bold, multi-institution collaboration, Samantha Brooker, Priyanga Ganesan, Elizabeth…
In the quantum world, the strong force is the invisible glue that keeps protons, neutrons, and everything else from flying apart. It acts where everyday intuition fails, at scales so tiny that a pinhead could hide millions of quarks and gluons within. Physicists who study this glue wrestle with equations that blur into a fog…
Autonomous vehicles are essentially sophisticated robots navigating a chaotic human world. They accomplish this breathtaking feat by constantly collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data from their surroundings, primarily in the form of point clouds—trillions of 3D points representing objects and surfaces. This data is the raw material for everything from collision avoidance to traffic…
When Light Becomes the Architect of Quantum Landscapes In the world of two-dimensional materials, a subtle twist can unlock extraordinary physics. By rotating atomically thin layers of semiconductors just a few degrees, researchers have discovered a playground of exotic phenomena—from unconventional superconductivity to correlated insulators. This magic lies in the moiré pattern, a delicate interference…
On a whiteboard, a graph can look like a constellation: points (vertices) linked by threads (edges) that braid into patterns we recognize as networks—social circles, transportation grids, or the tangled web of dependencies in software. A clique is a little club where everyone knows everyone else, a dense hub in the middle of a sparse…
In the world of materials simulations, the dream is simple: predict how a material behaves without dragging out the lab experiments. But the reality is messier. Fully detailed (all-atom) molecular dynamics can reveal how a polymer moves and interacts, yet it’s computationally heavy—like watching every grain of sand on a beach in real time. Coarse-grained…
Imagine trying to assemble a puzzle where some pieces are missing, or hidden under other parts of the image. That’s the challenge facing AI when it tries to understand the world around us. Objects are often partially hidden – a car behind a tree, a person obscured by a crowd. Teaching AI to ‘see’ these…
The crackle of electricity in the air, the sudden flash, the deafening roar – lightning strikes are terrifyingly unpredictable. But what if we could see them coming? A team of researchers, using innovative multiscale modeling, has made significant strides in understanding and predicting positive corona discharges, the electrical precursors to lightning. Unveiling the Secrets of…
The droplet perched on a surface is more than a pretty drop of water in a science fair. Its edge, the contact line where liquid meets solid and air, encodes a negotiation between molecules: a quiet vote about how much a surface wants to be kissed or ignored by a liquid. In industry, that tiny…
What online video grounding asks of a machine Every second, a streaming video unfurls a story. In a world of surveillance feeds, live sports, and endless social clips, there’s a practical itch: can a computer listen to a spoken query like a human would and point to the exact moment in the stream where it…
Imagine a landscape sculpted not of earth and stone, but of intricate mathematical structures. This is the realm of complex manifolds, spaces that blend the familiar geometry of our world with the added twist of complex numbers. These spaces are crucial in understanding fundamental aspects of physics and topology, yet their hidden properties remain elusive….
Imagine trying to solve a maze, but you can only look forward, never back. You’d probably stumble into a lot of dead ends, right? That’s kind of how current AI models tackle complex problems like math reasoning. They move step-by-step in a single direction, and if they mess up early on, it’s tough to correct…
Breast cancer screening saves lives when it happens on time, but access to screening is not evenly distributed. A team at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, across its Center for Biomedical Informatics and allied departments, has stitched together a map of the United States that shows where screening rates cluster high or low…
In the realm of pure mathematics, some ideas arrive like quiet ripples that slowly reshape the landscape. A free divisor is one of those objects—a kind of geometric wall in a complex space that, despite its apparent simplicity, hides a forest of intricate symmetries. The question researchers ask is deceptively concrete: when does a certain…
The Sun isn’t just a steady lamp in the sky. It’s a dynamic machine that hurls out storms, accelerates particles to near-light speeds, and sends signals across the solar system. One of the most surprising signals is gamma radiation that appears on the Sun’s visible disk even when the eruption happens on the far side…
In a world where most science writing is in English, a new study invites readers to listen to the chorus of languages that still carry knowledge across borders. The paper asks not just who publishes, but in what languages, and when readers cite those languages, too. The team behind the work is based at Université…
A New Look at Our Galactic Home For centuries, the Milky Way was our entire universe. Even as our understanding expanded to encompass countless other galaxies, our grasp of the Milky Way’s own structure, its history, and its place among other galaxies remained surprisingly limited. A new study from the University of Utah, led by…
Imagine a world where the familiar rules of algebra get a surreal twist. What if you could ‘grade’ rings—mathematical structures that generalize numbers—not just with integers or real numbers, but with entire groups? And what if the properties of these gradings revealed deep secrets about the rings themselves and the groups doing the grading? That’s…
In the world of medical imaging, every pixel tells a patient story—and every label attached to it costs time and money to create. For many clinics and researchers, the bottleneck isn’t the raw images but the painstaking work of outlining where a tumor ends and healthy tissue begins. A new approach called AugPaint suggests you…