A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

The first major progress on the rectangular peg problem was made in a proof from the late-1970s by Herbert Vaughan. The proof initiated a new way of thinking about the geometry of a rectangle and ...

Throughout nature, throngs of relatively simple elements can self-organize into behaviors that seem unexpectedly complex. Scientists are beginning to understand… ...

AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can process language could unlock deeper insights into ...

Editor’s note: In February 2023, a team of physicists led by Norman Yao of Harvard University published a comment about the holographic wormhole experiment described in this article. After analyzing ...

Manu Prakash’s many tools, top to bottom: a sheet of logic latches for a prototype of “thinking” materials; a glass and aluminum wheel for his new “gravity machine” microscope to map cells vertically ...

Picture a calm river. Now picture a torrent of white water. What is the difference between the two? To mathematicians and physicists it’s this: The smooth river flows in one direction, while the ...

I n 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. In their mathematical framework ...

Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray. Early evidence might not represent the bigger picture ...

Some of those who remained set to work scrutinizing decades-old assumptions. They started thinking anew about the striking features of nature that seem unnaturally fine-tuned — both the Higgs boson’s ...

Gröblacher and his colleagues created microbeams of silicon, each 10 micrometers long and 1 by 0.25 micrometers in cross-section. Each one featured holes along the beams that would absorb and trap ...

And indeed, while mathematicians showed in 1984 that twisted manifolds exist in dimension 62, no one could prove that such manifolds exist in any of the remaining dimensions.As search after search ...