Practically all modern computers, from the cheap microcontroller in your dishwasher to high-tech hardware crunching numbers for artificial intelligence systems, rely on versions of the same technology: slabs of silicon patterned with microscopic structures called […]
In the second half of the 20th century, a conceptual tsunami swept through physics. The discovery that our world emerges from a microscopic world of molecules, which emerges from an even more microscopic world of […]
In some ways, we know aging when we see it, from the graying of hair to the wrinkling of skin to declines in motor, sensory, and cognitive capacities. Yet the underlying biology of aging remains […]
At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the uncertainty principle, which says that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can […]
A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in […]
In a laboratory 2 kilometers underground, a crane lowers Matt Depatie, a detector technologist, through a hatch into a white-walled cavern filled with about 7,000 tons of ultrapure water that glows as blue as wiper […]
Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, but they are far from it. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, nor why a loved one’s touch soothes […]
At first glance, corals present as little more than colorful rocks — piles of lobes, stalagmites, and branches poking out from the seafloor. They are anything but. Corals are complex creatures that form enduring colonies, […]
On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model — one not available to the public — had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” […]
I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI “reasoning”? Sorry for the air quotes. That punctuational side-eye was more common in 2024, when the specially trained cousins of LLMs now known […]
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