A Teenager Solved a Stubborn Prime Number ‘Look-Alike’ Riddle
[ad_1] Mathematicians wanted to better understand these numbers that so closely resemble the most fundamental objects in number theory, the primes. It turned out that in 1899—a decade before Carmichael’s…
How Your Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions
[ad_1] Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that…
A Crucial Particle Physics Computer Program Risks Obsolescence
[ad_1] Recently, I watched a fellow particle physicist talk about a calculation he had pushed to a new height of precision. His tool? A 1980s-era computer program called FORM. Particle…
A New Computer Proof ‘Blows Up’ Centuries-Old Fluid Equations
[ad_1] For centuries, mathematicians have sought to understand and model the motion of fluids. The equations that describe how ripples crease the surface of a pond have also helped researchers…
Physicists Rewrite a Quantum Rule That Clashes With Our Universe
[ad_1] “There are some configurations of the future that don’t correspond to anything in the past,” Cotler said. “There’s nothing in the past that would evolve into them.” Giddings has…
Your Brain Uses Calculus to Control Fast Movements
[ad_1] A mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive pattern of…
The Enigma of Dragonfly 44, the Galaxy That’s Almost Invisible
[ad_1] In 2016, astronomers led by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University published a bombshell paper claiming the discovery of a galaxy so dim, yet so broad and heavy, that…
Three-Way Entanglement Results Hint at Better Quantum Codes
[ad_1] Last month, three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work proving one of the most counterintuitive yet consequential realities of the quantum world. They showed that…
The Fibonacci Numbers Hiding in Strange Spaces
[ad_1] McDuff and Schlenk had been trying to figure out when they could fit a symplectic ellipsoid—an elongated blob—inside a ball. This type of problem, known as an embedding problem,…
This Brain Molecule Decides Which Memories Are Happy—or Terrible
[ad_1] Further evidence of this bias comes from the reaction of the mice when they were first put into learning situations. Before they knew whether the new associations would be…
What Drives Galaxies? The Milky Way’s Black Hole May Be the Key
[ad_1] On May 12, at nine simultaneous press conferences around the world, astrophysicists revealed the first image of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. At first,…
Self-Taught AI May Have a Lot in Common With the Human Brain
[ad_1] For a decade now, many of the most impressive artificial intelligence systems have been taught using a huge inventory of labeled data. An image might be labeled “tabby cat”…
A Wheel Made of ‘Odd Matter’ Spontaneously Rolls Uphill
[ad_1] In a physics lab in Amsterdam, there’s a wheel that can spontaneously roll uphill by wiggling. This “odd wheel” looks simple: just six small motors linked together by plastic…
Epigenetic ‘Clocks’ Predict Animals’ True Biological Age
[ad_1] A new tool from Belsky and his colleagues, introduced in 2020 and updated earlier this year, acts as an aging speedometer. In creating their Pace of Aging biomarker, they…
The Webb Space Telescope Snaps Its First Photo of an Exoplanet
[ad_1] The JWST’s size and sensitivity enabled it to collect more light from this planet than any previous observatory has obtained. (Its photo looks grainier than SPHERE’s only because the…
Electric Fish Genomes Reveal How Evolution Repeats Itself
[ad_1] Along the murky bottom of the Amazon River, serpentine fish called electric eels scour the gloom for unwary frogs or other small prey. When one swims by, the fish…
At Long Last, Mathematical Proof That Black Holes Are Stable
[ad_1] In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein’s equations that precisely described the spacetime outside what we now call a rotating black hole. (The term wouldn’t…
Particle Physicists Puzzle Over a New Duality
[ad_1] Once found, these inscrutable rules have helped particle physicists calculate scattering amplitudes at much higher levels of precision than they could achieve with the traditional approach. The restructuring also…
The Hidden Chaos That Lurks in Ecosystems
[ad_1] By the early ’90s, ecologists had amassed enough time-series data sets on species populations and enough computing power to test these ideas. There was just one problem: The chaos…
Hypergraphs Reveal a Solution to a 50-Year-Old Problem
[ad_1] The goal here is to trace out triangles on top of these lines such that the triangles satisfy two requirements: First, no two triangles share an edge. (Systems that…
Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth
[ad_1] “Each one of those kinds of pyrite is telling us something different about our planet, its origin, about life, and how it’s changed through time,” said Hazen. For that…
Meet the Ukrainian Number Theorist Who Won Math’s Highest Honor
[ad_1] In late February, just weeks after Maryna Viazovska learned she had won a Fields Medal—the highest honor for a mathematician—Russian tanks and war planes began their assault on Ukraine,…