In causal claims, the chain from cause to effect is only as strong as what we leave out. Economists have long wrestled with omitted-variable bias, the dreaded specter that lurks when a relevant factor isn’t observed or controlled. Across dozens, then hundreds, of studies, researchers have relied on sensitivity analyses to ask: how robust are…
The cosmos may be harboring a quiet handshake between its two most mysterious components, dark matter and dark energy. A new study proposes a mechanism that keeps the background expansion exactly as in the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, but allows the two dark components to exchange energy at the level of tiny fluctuations….
In the genome, history isn’t a straight line; it’s a tangled web of splits and gene flows. A new mathematical study dares to map that web more boldly than ever, showing how to identify a wide class of evolutionary networks from genetic fingerprints called quartet concordance factors. The study was conducted by researchers from the…
Across the airwaves that knit our connected world, energy use is the quiet cost of speed. Bands get crowded, signals race through cities, and the hardware at the edge chews power to keep everything crisp. A new line of research argues we can cut waste not by adding more boxes but by rethinking how the…
The universe is not a blank abyss but a grand tapestry threaded with matter in filaments, sheets, and vast quiet pockets called voids. These voids aren’t empty so much as underfilled, like air pockets in a sponge, expanding and evolving as gravity shapes the cosmos. For decades, scientists have hunted for a workable map of…
Curves in algebraic geometry are not just lines or loops; they carry a symphony of possible shapes and the ways they can map into simpler spaces. A new mathematical picture helps us see how many distinct voices a general k-gonal curve can sing, and how those voices fit together into a grand choir. The study,…
The most powerful beams in science come with their own critics—their interactions with the world can ruin sensitive measurements. So researchers have long sought ways to study charged particle beams without tipping the scales. A recent experiment led by Rob Behary at William & Mary points the way toward a new kind of eye for…
Earth’s magnetic field is a stubborn compass we rarely question—until it flips. The planet’s polarity has reversed many times over its long history, one of the most dramatic demonstrations that the deep interior is not a still and quiet engine but a throbbing dynamo. The paleomagnetic record shows periods where the field is dipole-dominant and…
In the furnace of a heavy-ion collision, a sea of quarks and gluons briefly forgets the usual rules of confinement. Physicists read the drama by watching a tiny, stubborn spectator: quarkonium, a bound pair of a heavy quark and its antiquark. The way these heavy pairs survive or vanish in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) acts…
In a quiet corner of fluid dynamics, a team from the University of Pittsburgh set out to model a tiny valley inside a laboratory. They built a V shaped cavity and heated its bottom walls, hoping the math would reveal how heat, stratification, and rough terrain conspire to create the kind of airflows that shape…
The puzzle of the superpermutation has long sounded like a carnival trick in the world of combinatorics: a single string that somehow contains all possible orders of n distinct symbols as substrings. It sounds almost magical, until you realize that the problem isn’t just a parlor game for theorists; it touches encoding, data compression, and…
Graphs are the hidden streets of modern AI: social networks where friends connect, citation maps where topics cross-pollinate, product graphs where shoppers discover new things. In these networks, the challenge isn’t just to classify a node, but to tell when a node doesn’t fit the pattern of anything the system has seen before. That’s the…
In a sunlit research lab in Vancouver, a question hovered over the hum of computers: when you’re teaching a machine to read medical pathology reports, does it help to go big and broad, or small and specialized? The British Columbia Cancer Registry team, backed by the University of British Columbia’s Data Science Institute, set out…
Extreme heat is not just a meteorology problem; it’s a public health deadline. When thermometers surge, people suffer—especially the most vulnerable in cities with aging power grids, crowded housing, or limited access to cooling. As climate change nudges heat waves toward longer durations and higher peaks, forecasts become lifelines: they guide hospital preparations, energy management,…
The public loves numbers. They’re the breadcrumbs that lead from a city block to a bigger story about what life looks like in a country. Census tables, housing counts, neighborhood slices—the kind of aggregate statistics that arrive with the glow of authority and the comfort of anonymity. But privacy researchers keep nagging at the edges…
In the quantum world, errors aren’t just annoying bugs. They’re stubborn fingerprints that cling to qubits, drift through circuits, and threaten to erase the delicate information quantum memory stores. When researchers talk about stabilizer measurements, they’re describing a concerted effort to keep the music in tune—detecting missteps and correcting them before the melody collapses into…
The wave of big language models has carried with it a lot of bravado about what machines can do—and how quickly they can do it. But in classrooms and law offices alike, a quieter question has been gathering steam: can artificial intelligences judge complex, open‑ended work the way humans do? A team from Maritaca AI…
The study of groups acting on spaces isn’t just about abstract symbols dancing on a chalkboard. It’s about how a collection of elements can move, stretch, and rearrange geometric worlds in ways that reveal the group’s hidden personality. When those spaces are hyperbolic — spaces with negative curvature that bend and zoom in on the…
The world of data is hardly a single, tidy map. It looks more like a constellation: nodes representing people, institutions, or transactions, connected by threads that carry information, risk, or influence. In many real networks those threads aren’t evenly friendly. Some neighborhoods tilt toward similarity, while others are built on cross currents. That pattern, where…
Graphs are the scuffed, sprawling maps of the modern information era. They stitch together people, papers, products, and places with threads that can carry tone, time, and intention. But the real world isn’t tidy. It throws curveballs in the form of out-of-distribution, or OOD, nodes—points that don’t quite fit the patterns the model was trained…