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…
Black holes are not solitary voids; they live in neighborhoods. In a study led by Ariadna Uxue Palomino Ylla at Nagoya University, with colleagues Yasutaka Koga and Chul-Moon Yoo, researchers treat a black hole as if it wears a cloak—steely, invisible, and moving in step with a steady flow of matter. The work, a collaboration…
The cosmos we inhabit is astonishingly uniform on large scales, yet the whispers of subtle irregularities still echo through the data. The standard story—that space is, for all practical purposes, the same in all directions and at all places—rests on Einstein’s theory of gravity and the simple, elegant FLRW model. But physicists love to poke…
Our eyes are more than lenses and light traps; they’re living sculptures, flexing under pressure as if tiny pressure-cookers held in a delicate glass globe. Glaucoma, one of the leading causes of irreversible blindness, latches onto that tension and reshapes the optic nerve head in ways we’re only starting to understand. A new line of…
From the sky, the world collapses into a mosaic of roads, rooftops, and moving silhouettes. Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, promise a kind of overhead commonsense: see more, cover more ground, react faster. Yet teaching a fleet of drones to understand a scene together while talking a language that doesn’t drown in data is a…
In the quiet corners of a Greek lab, a handful of researchers introduced something that sounds like science fiction: a single AI that can plan, run, and audit an entire research workflow—end to end—without writing a line of code. This is not a rumor about a far-off dream, but a concrete open‑source project called mAIstro,…
Distributed computing runs on a simple premise: many tiny machines coordinate through local messages to solve global problems. One of the most elegant tools in this space is a ruling set—a small, independent subset of nodes that still manages to cover the whole network within a fixed distance. Think of it as a handful of…
Intro — a quiet harmony inside cryptography’s wild algebra Boolean functions are the backstage crew of modern cryptography: tiny, binary machines that help scramble and unscramble information in ways that look random but are governed by precise rules. Among these, a special breed called bent functions stands out for its perfect nonlinear charm. They’re the…
In the world of distributed computing, speed is measured in two ways that rarely line up perfectly: how many rounds of communication you need (time) and how many messages you churn through (the bill for bandwidth, energy, and processing). For decades, researchers have chased near-optimal time with clever protocols, then separately chased tight message budgets…
Four-dimensional dynamics isn’t a party you can easily picture. The usual three-dimensional intuition—where a butterfly’s wings tremble into a roar of chaos—loses its footing when extra dimensions enter the room. Yet a new lineage of mathematical work has found a way to choreograph chaos in a space that feels almost alien: a four-dimensional stage built…
In MRI suites around the world, radiologists parse intricate textures and shapes, hunting for the telltale signs of clinically significant prostate cancer. It’s a careful craft, a blend of pattern recognition and medical intuition, and it can be slow—especially when clinicians must comb through thousands of slices to segment the exact tumor boundaries. A new…
In the mathematical landscape, symmetry is a compass. It guides how objects relate, how patterns repeat, and how wild ideas become navigable maps. The paper you’re about to read lives at the intersection of symmetry, algebra, and something called a graded Hecke algebra—a mouthful, but the story is vivid: a non-crystallographic geometry known as type…
Intro Code is a moving target. It evolves, breaks, and mends itself through the stubborn dance of tests and patches. The dream behind SWE-smith is simpler in spirit than it sounds: what if you could scale the data you feed to software engineering AIs by building environments that let them learn from actually failing code,…
On a bustling street, a driver inches toward an intersection, pauses at a red light, and then glides on. A pedestrian sneaks a quick glance at a storefront, then resumes a steady walk. A delivery truck takes a detour around a construction zone, rejoining the main route moments later. All of these micro‑moments—stops, turns, tiny…
In a world where pictures travel the same lightning-fast as words, a provocative idea is taking shape: maybe you don’t need to squeeze every pixel to tell a story. Maybe you can describe the scene, then let a powerful image generator rebuild it from those words and a sliver of visual hint. The question isn’t…
Planar Coloring Reveals Hidden Rules of Local Girth Coloring graphs is more than a nerdy pastime for mathematicians. It sits at the crossroads of art and logic, a way to turn tangled webs into readable patterns. The Four Color Theorem told us that every map can be colored with just four colors so that neighboring…
Hydrogen is the simplest atom, and yet the trimer H3+ is one of the most stubbornly rich molecules in physics. It sits at the crossroads of fundamental quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, and the chemistry of the cosmos. For decades, scientists have pursued ever more precise calculations of its rovibrational energy levels—the tiny quantum states that govern…
The Electron–Ion Collider project at Brookhaven National Laboratory is blueprinted to push photons and protons into one tunnel and coax them to behave. At the heart of that ambition lies a delicate balancing act in the Hadron Storage Ring, in a cooling section known as IR2, where electrons and hadrons ride together to reduce the…