In the era of smart assistants and endless recommendations, our choices aren’t just a product of what we’ve clicked before. They’re shaped by context—the time, place, mood, and even the device we’re using. Yet most computational systems still rely on flat rules and generic signals to predict what we might want next. A team from…
In a sunlit corner of finance research, JPMorgan Chase’s Global Technology Applied Research group has explored a bold idea: could the quirky logic of quantum physics actually make solving the clean, abstract problem of convex optimization faster? The paper, authored by Shouvanik Chakrabarti, Dylan Herman, Jacob Watkins, Enrico Fontana, Brandon Augustino, Junhyung Lyle Kim, and…
Light has a way of surprising us just when we think we’ve cornered it. Spontaneous emission—the quiet habit of an excited quantum system shedding energy by emitting a photon—has long been a bedrock idea in quantum optics. Yet in many real materials the first excited state isn’t a tidy rung on a ladder. It’s a…
Cosmology often feels like a grand detective story where the clues are not just galaxies and supernovae, but the deepest rules that govern reality itself. A new paper from a team anchored in Greek institutions takes a bold turn in that story by asking what happens if the very thermodynamic rules we apply at horizons…
Do AGN winds teach galaxies to breathe and grow? In the heart of most galaxies sits a supermassive black hole, quietly feasting on gas until it erupts in an outflow that can sweep across thousands of light-years. For decades, astronomers have wrestled with a simple question: when these winds surge outward, do they snuff out…
Long videos have become the new normal, but our minds aren’t built for hours of uninterrupted attention. A lecture, a documentary, or a kitchen-show marathon can wander through ideas, scenes, and anecdotes, and it’s easy to lose track of where you are in the journey. The problem isn’t just about storage; it’s about navigation—how to…
A pulse of light isn’t just a wave. It’s a tempo, a tiny dancer, and sometimes a turning wheel traveling at the speed of a rumor. In ultrafast optics labs, researchers have learned to sculpt light so that its twist exists not only in space but in time itself. The creatures of this twist are…
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…