Graphs are people’s stories drawn as networks: arrows and paths that hint at direction, speed, and influence. When researchers study these directed stories, they need a kind of reading tool that can cope with both structure and flow. That tool is directed treewidth, a way to measure how tangled a directed graph is and, crucially,…
The forecasting world loves a clean score. A single number, a neat SMAPE or MAPE, and we feel like we understand a model’s performance. But in the messy real world, data behave like weather: they shift, surprise, and reveal different strengths and weaknesses at different moments. The new study behind ModelRadar argues that this hunger…
When a class of budding programmers hands in a program, the scene in the grading room often resembles a cross between detective work and interpretation. You don’t just check if the code runs; you sift through intent, strategy, and the student’s grasp of a concept. In a striking study from BITS Pilani in Pilani, India,…
Cosmology often feels like a treasure hunt along a foggy shoreline, where equations sketch the tides of time and the shape of space. A Brown University team turns the hunt inward, asking not for a single grand law but for the way a whole family of diagrams stitches together the universe’s wavefunction, diagram by diagram….
In mathematics, a group is not a crowd on a street corner so much as a rulebook for combining objects. Some rulebooks are brutally simple: add, multiply, repeat, and you’re done. Others are more subtle, their implications rippling through the entire structure. A “law” in this world is a nontrivial word in a free group…
Probability isn’t a single number or a single rule of thumb. It’s a landscape, a space of possibilities where distributions live and move. Mathematicians map that landscape as a density manifold, a place where tiny nudges to a distribution feel like moving along a curve rather than flipping a switch. In that world, what you…
Hypergraphs are like social ecosystems where a single event can bind more than two participants at once. In a k-uniform hypergraph, each edge binds k vertices in a single tug of connection. The physics of these objects isn’t about mass alone but about how those multi-way connections accumulate around tiny, stubborn motifs that won’t go…
The lab’s hum is almost musical: a whisper-soft reflection of light against a tiny semiconductor that houses a single, stubbornly quantum spin. In the best experiments, observing something as simple as a reflected photon becomes a doorway into the heart of a quantum system. This new work from Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, and the Centre de…
Deep in the cosmic seas where galaxy clusters form and reign, there are giant bubbles inflated by jets from supermassive black holes. These cavities push aside hot gas, creating X-ray faint pockets that glow faintly in radio waves. The Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect—the way the cosmic microwave background is distorted as it passes through hot electrons—offers…
The Berkeley-based work by Pentti Kanerva from the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience dares to rethink how learning could work inside machines by borrowing a page from biology, psychology, and traditional computing all at once. It doesn’t promise a magic shortcut to sentient robots, but it does offer a striking, almost tactile way to think…
The dream of a scalable quantum computer is as much about energy as it is about qubits. Every improvement in qubit quality, error correction, or clever circuit design can be undone by the stubborn heat that leaks out of every wire, every control line, every amplifier pulsing at cryogenic temperatures. In a new vantage point,…
Light carries a chorus of harmonics, like a musical chorus that can be shifted to higher notes. For engineers building tiny optical circuits, tuning that chorus used to mean turning a dial or threading a temperature knob. But those methods are slow at the scale of modern photonics. A team at Queens College and The…
In the fast-moving world of forecasting, the loudest voices often push for newer, bigger, more intricate models. You build a Transformer here, a graph neural network there, and pretty soon you’ve got a toolkit that resembles a space shuttle: powerful, dazzling, but sometimes overkill for the job at hand. A study from MIT’s Department of…
Cities wear their traffic like a living skin—lanes, signals, and crossings pulsing with the rhythm of a dozen tiny decisions every second. The old, fixed-timetable traffic lights feel almost like a museum exhibit: reliable, yes, but out of step with the tempo of real life. A line of cars waiting forever at a red, a…
In the stubborn, swirling world of fluid motion, the Navier–Stokes equations sit like a puzzle box. They describe how every ripple and wake evolves, from the swirls in a teacup to the grand churn of the atmosphere. For more than a century, mathematicians have chased a single, almost mythical prize: a guarantee that starting from…
In a world of endless scrolling, your feed isn’t just a sequence of videos or posts; it’s a living experiment. Recommender systems learn from what you click, watch, or skim, and they tune themselves to maximize engagement. But the side effect is a popularity bias: items that are already popular get more exposure, which makes…
Geometry sits at a peculiar crossroads. It houses the smooth continuity of lines and surfaces while also harboring a stubborn discrete side: how many ways can pieces intersect, split space, and create new regions? Stefan Forcey, at The University of Akron, leads us into that boundary in Counting Plane Arrangements via Oriented Matroids. The paper…
The mathematics of symmetry is rarely tidy. It bleeds into physics, geometry, and even the way we model information. In the last decade, a thriving language has emerged to capture these ideas: vertex operator algebras, or VOAs. These objects sit at the crossroads of two-dimensional conformal field theory, string theory, and deep algebraic structures. They’re…
The space between stars isn’t empty. It’s a living, churning medium where gas exists in three main guises: ionized, atomic, and molecular. It’s threaded with magnetic fields that twist, tangle, and sometimes cooperate with the gas to sculpt how galaxies form stars and churn out cosmic rays. A new study from Amit Seta and N….
Intro The latest wave of artificial intelligence has begun to nudge its way into classrooms, tutoring apps, and study groups. A new study from SUNY Maritime College asks a simple, old question in a high-tech disguise: can a machine really reason through calculus, or does it merely mimic the steps well enough to fool a…