Artificial intelligence that can reason about actions and change is a hunter for real-world autonomy. From robots gripping objects to delivery fleets plotting routes, the ability to plan is what keeps AI from merely reacting to the present and instead shaping a reliable path toward the future. A team at IBM Research—Harsha Kokel, Michael Katz,…
The cold math of quantum motion has a way of making chaos look like a blueprint. In solids and other quantum systems, disorder can trap particles in place, a phenomenon known as Anderson localization. In one dimension, even modest randomness can pin a particle so it cannot wander freely. In higher dimensions the story gets…
When you flip through a sequence of AI-generated images, you expect the same character to show up again and again—the same face, the same hat, the same mood. Yet in practice, even the best image engines drift. A character who appears in one frame as a confident, sunlit portrait can look subtly different in the…
The cosmos is full of loud, spectacular things: supernovae, exploding stars, giant black holes gobbling gas in galaxies far away. Yet some of the most decisive work happens quietly, in the spaces where galaxies and their invisible engines meet. A new study maps how the jets blasted out by supermassive black holes—jets that carry energy…
Space near the most extreme objects in the universe behaves like a carnival mirror: it twists light, stretches time, and turns simple paths into elaborate loops. Around massive, compact bodies, photons can get stuck in orbit, tracing circles that look almost musical in their precision. These light rings, or null circular geodesics, are more than…
Jet sprays blazing through the quark-gluon plasma aren’t just pretty fireworks. They’re a messy, real-time experiment, a probe that travels through a hot, dense medium and records how the medium responds. For years, physicists have tried to describe those jets with a blend of blunt approximations and computational tricks, hoping to separate the jet’s own…
The largest structures in the universe aren’t just big; they’re unruly in the most human way: they hide parts of themselves from plain sight. Galaxy clusters are enormous wells of gravity, chessboards where dark matter, galaxies, and a sea of superheated gas play out a slow-motion drama. For decades, astronomers have tried to weigh these…
In a world where 5G densifies and the air around antennas hums with signals, there’s a quiet problem scientists are finally solving: how can we know tomorrow’s electromagnetic energy exposure with real, usable confidence? A new deep learning framework named EMForecaster aims to do just that. It doesn’t just predict numbers; it also tells you…
The phrase altermagnetism sounds like a science-fiction handshake between two stubborn magnets. Yet in the real world it’s a tangible, recently spotlighted magnetic phase where spin splits in momentum space without giving you a net magnetization. In plain terms: the electrons’ spins tease out a pattern as they move, but the whole crystal still doesn’t…
In the quiet math of crystals, electrons swirl not just through real space but through a hidden landscape called momentum space. Here, a geometric twist—known as Berry curvature—acts like an invisible wind that can bend charge in ways conventional electric and magnetic fields cannot. The anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) is one measurable whisper of that…
Networks are the hidden scaffolding of modern life, from the neurons that spark our thoughts to the social webs we scroll every day. When those networks host opposing forces, the tension doesn’t just slow things down; it reshapes the very possible futures the system can inhabit. A team of physicists led by Giulio Iannelli and…
Behind the quiet hum of arithmetic lies a surprisingly social question: when you look at two neighbors on the number line, n and n+1, how their divisors stack up can tell you something about the fabric of the integers themselves. The function d(n) counts how many divisors n has, from 1 up to n itself….
Markets look like well-oiled machines on the surface: prices drift, risk is priced, and clever traders try to carve out a risk‑free profit by exploiting tiny mispricings. But behind the scenes the future is not a single weather forecast; it’s a landscape of many possible futures, each with its own probability. That kind of ambiguity…
The quantum world loves to bend our intuition about information. Classical channels carry bits in neat, predictable packets, while entanglement shows up as spooky correlations that don’t look like anything you’ve seen in a regular conversation. The paper by Elna Svegborn, Jef Pauwels, and Armin Tavakoli, based largely out of Lund University in Sweden, takes…
The math world often wears its ideas on the wall like a diagram with arrows and boxes. But when you step back, you discover that the real drama happens not in the bold strokes but in the subtle tremors along the edges. This is especially true when we study how a shape as familiar as…
Memory often feels like a disciplined sequence: a string of letters, a tape of numbers, a chain of symbols. In the world of polymers and mass spectrometry, scientists imagine reading data by weighing fragments and piecing together the original order. A new line of thinking takes this further: what if the data aren’t just strings…
The topic sounds abstract, but its heartbeat is surprisingly human: when does a system’s spectrum become a finite, countable chorus, and how densely can those notes crowd the orchestra of possible energies? A recent in‑depth survey by Jakob Reiffenstein of Stockholm University and Harald Woracek of Vienna University of Technology dives straight into that question…
Two paths to a galaxy’s heart Key idea: The relationship between a galaxy’s central black hole and its stellar mass isn’t a single, universal rule. New work from researchers at Dartmouth College with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center shows that the growth history of a galaxy can push its black hole to different places on…
Foundations: the macroscopic map of curved space If you’ve ever wandered through a geometry textbook, you know curvature isn’t just about bending a sheet of paper. It’s a global property, felt not in a single spot but across the entire space. In higher dimensions, those global features can look completely different when you zoom out…
Highlights of a Hidden Force Highlights: Magnetic fields thread stars as quietly as gravity threads planets, yet they sculpt their winds, pulsations, and destinies. A small, stubborn fraction of massive stars carry fossil magnetic fields at their surfaces, unlike the sun’s dynamo-generated magnetism. By watching how light splits, polarizes, and shifts as stars spin, scientists…