In the language of pure mathematics, partitions are the way we slice numbers into neat, nonincreasing stacks. Picture a city skyline built from squares, where each row is a row of blocks, and the height of each row tells you something about how the number n is assembled. Now add a twist: a hook length,…
Scattering amplitudes—the probabilities of how particles collide and scatter in high-energy physics—are usually described with a language that feels almost like a secret code. In string theory, that code comes in many dialects: open strings, closed strings, bosonic strings, superstrings, and their various cousins. A new study, led by Qu Cao and collaborators across Zhejiang…
On social feeds, health stories arrive in a torrent: a cousin’s fever dream, a cautious post from a friend, a headline about the next flu season. For public health teams, turning that torrent into trustworthy signals is essential, but notoriously hard. Slang, memes, sarcasm, and figurative language warp the meaning of a single sentence, and…
Quantum computers promise to solve problems classical machines can’t crack, but their memory layer—the quantum random access memory, QRAM—has been the stubborn bottleneck. QRAMs are meant to let a quantum processor fetch data from a database in a superposition, enabling powerful operations like searching an unordered database or assembling a desired quantum state directly from…
The field of econophysics thrives on a simple idea wearing a much bigger coat: tiny, everyday exchanges between individuals can ripple into huge shifts in wealth across a whole society. The paper by Thiago Dias and Sebastie1n Gone7alves from Brazilian universities takes that idea and asks a provocative question in a very human setting: what…
The world of clinical trials often feels like a race to prove one word: effective. Yet patients don’t live in single moments of success—their lives are a stream of events: hospital visits, aches, hospital stays, and sometimes the final, terminal event. Traditional analyses tend to spotlight the first major event and then stop, as if…
In the study of complex systems—think epidemics with different susceptibilities, cell communities with many kinds, or sprawling networks—scientists model the growth as a branching process: each individual spawns a random number of offspring, each with its own type. A frontier case emerges when the average number of offspring per individual hovers exactly at one; this…
In the grand drama of the cosmos, some actors never quite leave the stage. Neutron stars, newborn from supernovae or forged in violent mergers, carry chapters of physics that are almost never tested on Earth. A new set of general-purpose equations of state (EOS) for dense matter aims to give astrophysical simulators a clearer, more…
The moment you start trusting a neural network with real-world decisions, you also invite a quiet kind of treachery: backdoor attacks. A handful of manipulated training examples can plant hidden triggers that flip a model’s behavior in response to a cue that only the attacker can see. The rest of the time, the model behaves…
Budgeting for a year of conferences, trips, or family plans is a ritual of estimation and compromise. You sketch rough costs for flights, hotels, and registrations, then you improvise as receipts arrive and prices wobble. A new study turns this everyday uncertainty into a mathematics of decision making. It asks a deceptively simple question: if…