For the first time, researchers have determined how a human olfactory receptor captures an airborne scent molecule, the pivotal chemical event that triggers our sense of smell. Whether it evokes roses or vanilla, cigarettes or […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Machine learning models are incredibly powerful tools. They extract deeply hidden patterns in large data sets that our limited human brains can’t parse. These complex algorithms, then, need to be incomprehensible “black boxes,” because a […]
The first proof that many people ever learn, early in high school, is the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. It takes just a few lines and uses no […]
In March 2018 at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, surrounded by his devoted keepers, Sudan the northern white rhino breathed his last. He wasn’t the only remaining northern white rhino because three females in […]
Torrents of charged particles continuously lift off the sun’s atmosphere and radiate outward at millions of kilometers per hour, yielding a solar wind so immense that its limit defines the outer edge of our solar […]
As an undergraduate at the University of Chile, Bernardo Subercaseaux took a dim view of using computers to do math. It seemed antithetical to real intellectual discovery. “There’s some instinct or gut reaction against using […]
Dazzling intricacies of brain structure are revealed every day, but one of the most obvious aspects of brain wiring eludes neuroscientists. The nervous system is cross-wired, so that the left side of the brain controls […]
It’s not an exaggeration to say that every major advance in physics for more than a century has turned on revelations about symmetry. It’s there at the dawn of general relativity, in the birth of […]
Tracie Seimon discovered her passion for the natural world early. As a child growing up in Colorado, she enjoyed “harvesting insects” from her family backyard and keeping a hobby ant farm. When she saw trees […]
Despite the wild success of ChatGPT and other large language models, the artificial neural networks (ANNs) that underpin these systems might be on the wrong track. For one, ANNs are “super power-hungry,” said Cornelia Fermüller, […]
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