Boundary layers are the quiet borderlands where fast-moving gas meets a wall or edge. In engineering, they decide where heat sticks, where drag bites, and where shocks lurk just out of sight. A new study led by Yi Wang, Yong-Fu Yang, and Qiuyang Yu—working across the Chinese Academy of Sciences and its partner institutions—pulls back…
Video is eating the internet, and the appetite only grows as platforms push shorter, sharper moments that fit into a phone screen and a single scroll. In this crowded landscape, IIT Bombay researchers have cooked up DEEVISum, a lightweight, smart way to turn long videos into concise, meaningful summaries without demanding a fortress of compute….
Quantum physics tends to feel like a language spoken in a quiet, exacting dialect of mathematics. Yet every so often a study comes along that makes the alphabet itself seem pliable, almost musical. A recent line of work from researchers at the University of Burgos and collaborators in La Plata, Argentina, does just that. They…
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…
When a politician speaks, cameras capture the moment; when those moments travel through the internet, they can be rewritten in the blink of an editing tool. Deepfakes have moved from curiosities to everyday threats, and the question isn’t whether we can detect fakes after they arrive, but how to prevent them from being born in…
In the growing chorus of artificial intelligence that can describe a photo, translate a caption, or answer a riddle about a chart, a stubborn question keeps echoing: can these systems really combine multiple skills at once, or do they stumble when the task demands several abilities at the same time? It’s a bit like asking…
In the quantum world, information can get lost not in a single puff of dust but through a slow, intricate tangle of interactions. It’s like dropping a spark into a crowded ballroom: the spark travels, flickers away, and reappears elsewhere, not as a neat message but as a sprawling pattern that’s almost impossible to follow…
The centers of galaxies are underground cities where supermassive black holes gulp gas, churn it into light, and sometimes surprise us with fireworks. Among the most revealing fireworks are episodes when an active galactic nucleus, or AGN, briefly brightens in ways that illuminate the architecture of the inner engine. A recent study of a particularly…
In the coming decade, the Roman Space Telescope will map the universe’s invisible skeleton by chasing faint distortions in the shapes of distant galaxies. But turning that subtle signal into trustworthy cosmology hinges on one stubborn detail: the telescope’s eye, the Point Spread Function or PSF. The PSF tells you how a point of light…
In many physical problems, a boundary isn’t just a line on a map; it’s a stage that reshapes the entire drama. The fractional Laplacian, a mathematical gadget that captures how things hop, wiggle, or spread in space with a nonlocal twist, plays nicely on an infinite plane but behaves very differently when you confine it…
The Large Hadron Collider keeps throwing curves at our understanding of the tiniest building blocks. Among the most intriguing players on the stage are the top quarks, heavy enough to act like test particles for the quantum rules that bind the subatomic world. Their spins don’t just flip and flop in isolation; they whisper about…
A Tree Network Quietly Rewrites Open Quantum Dynamics From the kitchen-table questions of how a molecule feels the flicker of its surroundings to the high-stakes dreams of scalable quantum machines, one problem has haunted everyone: when a quantum system sits in a real environment, its delicate quantum properties don’t just fade away—they complain, argue, and…
Mathematicians love cycles. A simple cycle in a graph is a loop that visits every vertex once, a kind of perfect stroll through a network. But in the wild, multi-vertex edges of a hypergraph turn that stroll into a marathon with many ways to slip through the same landscape. If you want to talk about…
When researchers peek at the vast universe of all possible rules that could relate a handful of items, they often discover that the most famous ideas travel across boundaries—from pure math to computer science to everyday intuition. A recent study by Rudolf Berghammer of Kiel, Jules Desharnais of Université Laval, and Michael Winter of Brock…
Cosmology is now a dialogue between the very large and the very small. The universe is expanding and accelerating, a fact that pushes physicists to ask how a quantum theory of gravity could accommodate a cosmos like ours. Among the big questions is whether string theory—our leading candidate for a quantum theory of gravity—can produce…
In the quiet mathematics of signals, there’s a stubborn myth: you need every piece to understand the whole. Buried in the arXiv preprint from University of Rochester mathematician W. Burstein, that myth gets a polite knock on the door. The paper asks whether you can pull a surprisingly large subset of components from a bounded,…
In the world of signals—think audio clips, medical scans, or the data streaming from a sensor array—there’s a quiet mathematical trick that helps us keep information intact even when pieces of it go missing. It’s not magic. It’s a framework of vectors that, when arranged just so, lets you reconstruct the whole from partial glimpses….
In the quiet edge of space, tiny satellites carry outsized ambitions. They must reorient themselves to point their antennas, cameras, and solar panels where they need to—often with little to no human help. The physics is unforgiving: three rotational axes, a chorus of tiny torques, and the lingering possibility that one wheel can quit without…
Geometry, the math of shapes and spaces, sometimes behaves like a stubborn clay sculpture. You tilt it, expectation says it should settle, but on certain far-flung landscapes—noncompact spaces that stretch to infinity—the rules are harder to pin down. The Ricci flow is one of the most powerful tools we have for smoothing that clay, a…
Pulsars are the embers of exploded stars: dense, fast, and still wonderfully restless. They spin hundreds of times per second, carving out a wind of charged particles that travel through the surrounding space and, in some cases, light up the sky in gamma rays at energies that dwarf visible light. For years astronomers watched a…