The Dance of Probability: A New Algorithm for Optimal Transport Imagine a river, its currents weaving through a landscape. This isn’t just any river; it’s a river of probability, its flow representing the movement of data points across a space. Guiding this river, shaping its course, is the challenge of optimal transport — a crucial…
Beyond Temperature: The Hidden Lengths of Thermal Chaos We tend to think of heating a physical system as a straightforward process: crank up the temperature, and the system relaxes smoothly into a predictable, disordered state. But a new study from the University of Geneva and Princeton University reveals a surprising wrinkle in this story. As…
In the quiet borders of math and physics, scientists chase whispers of information that arrive through noise. Some whispers come from faraway echoes of a signal we can’t see directly, and the challenge is to reconstruct what happened from the clues left in a handful of measurements. That task is what mathematicians call an inverse…
Imagine a world where we could fine-tune artificial intelligence without the usual massive computational costs and risks. That’s the promise of a groundbreaking new technique developed by researchers at UNC Chapel Hill, detailed in their paper, GRAINS (Gradient-based Attribution for Inference-Time Steering of LLMs and VLMs). Forget painstaking retraining; this method allows us to tweak…
The Metal Pad Roll Instability: A Dance of Liquids and Magnetism Imagine a giant cauldron, humming with electrical energy, where molten aluminum rests beneath a layer of cryolite – a mineral bath essential for aluminum production. This seemingly simple setup, at the heart of the Hall-Heroult process, hides a surprisingly complex instability: the metal pad…
Beyond Words Voices Shape Our Stories We often think of chatbots and AI assistants as text-based creatures, answering questions with typed words or synthesized speech that sounds pleasant but generic. Yet, human communication is far richer than text alone. The tone, pitch, rhythm, and emotion in a voice carry layers of meaning that text struggles…
Forecasting the future often feels like trying to predict the weather in a storm—complex, noisy, and full of surprises. Yet, from climate models to cryptocurrency prices, our world increasingly depends on accurate predictions of time series data: sequences of measurements evolving over time. A team of researchers from the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in…
What goofy transformations are and why they matter Highlights: A newly explored idea in quantum field theory challenges what counts as a symmetry. Instead of a traditional symmetry that mirrors a faithful, unbroken pattern in the equations, goofy transformations flirt with sign flips in the kinetic terms. Yet they can lock in stable relationships between…
In the zippy world of particle physics, charm quarks are like cameo appearances in a grand, never-ending stage play. They flicker into existence for a moment, then vanish, leaving behind clues about how matter holds itself together at the smallest scales. A new study led by Antoni Szczurek of the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish…
The world of finite groups is the ultimate catalog of symmetry. Mathematicians crowd into it not with physical objects, but with abstract ideas: how objects can be rearranged, what counts as the same under a twist, and what hidden patterns emerge when you probe a group with its own representations. A character table is like…