Learning English is no easy task, as countless students well know. But when the student is a computer, one approach works surprisingly well: Simply feed mountains of text from the internet to a giant mathematical model called a neural network. That’s the operating principle behind generative language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, whose ability to converse… Continue reading Tiny Language Models Thrive With GPT-4 as a Teacher
Category: Quantum Stuff
Dangerous ‘Superbugs’ Are on the Rise. What Can Stop Them?
The bacteria may have entered her flesh along with shrapnel from the bomb detonated in Brussels Airport in 2016. Or perhaps the microbes hitched a ride on the surgical instruments used to treat her wounds. Either way, the “superbug” refused to be vanquished, despite years of antibiotic treatment. The woman had survived a terrorist attack… Continue reading Dangerous ‘Superbugs’ Are on the Rise. What Can Stop Them?
FEMA Offers Every State $2 Million to Adopt Safer Building Codes
CLIMATEWIRE | Two houses are side by side. One is a crumpled mess of splintered wood and ripped insulation. The other stands perfectly intact. This image is one that increasingly pops up on news sites and social media after hurricanes, floods and climate-fueled disasters. An accompanying caption often emphasizes that the intact home was built with… Continue reading FEMA Offers Every State $2 Million to Adopt Safer Building Codes
This Is The Largest Map of The Human Brain Ever Made
Researchers have created the largest atlas of human brain cells so far, revealing more than 3,000 cell types — many of which are new to science. The work, published in a package of 21 papers today in Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine, will aid the study of diseases, cognition and what makes us human, among other things, say the… Continue reading This Is The Largest Map of The Human Brain Ever Made
Invisible Electron ‘Demon’ Discovered in Odd Superconductor
A few years ago, the researchers decided to put a superconducting metal called strontium ruthenate in their crosshairs. Its structure is similar to that of a mysterious class of copper-based “cuprate” superconductors, but it can be manufactured in a more pristine way. While the team didn’t learn the secrets of the cuprates, the material responded… Continue reading Invisible Electron ‘Demon’ Discovered in Odd Superconductor
In Our Cellular Clocks, She’s Found a Lifetime of Discoveries
For more than a quarter century, Partch has lived among the orchestrators of the circadian clock, the proteins whose rise and fall control its workings. As a postdoc, she produced the first visualization of the bound pair of proteins at its heart, CLOCK and BMAL1. Since then, she has continued to make visible the whorls… Continue reading In Our Cellular Clocks, She’s Found a Lifetime of Discoveries
We Need to Think about Conservation on a Different Timescale
Time is one of humanity’s greatest blind spots. We experience it as days, months, or years. But nature functions on much grander scales, measured in centuries, millennia and even longer intervals often lumped together as “deep time.” As paleontologists, we were trained to think in deep time. Yet, as conservationists, we’ve come to realize that… Continue reading We Need to Think about Conservation on a Different Timescale
The Deep Link Equating Math Proofs and Computer Programs
Some scientific discoveries matter because they reveal something new — the double helical structure of DNA, for example, or the existence of black holes. However, some revelations are profound because they show that two old concepts, once thought distinct, are in fact the same. Take James Clerk Maxwell’s equations showing that electricity and magnetism are… Continue reading The Deep Link Equating Math Proofs and Computer Programs
Echoes of Electromagnetism Found in Number Theory
Pairings like that between automorphic forms and Galois groups are called dualities. They suggest that different classes of objects mirror each other, which allows mathematicians to study either one in terms of the other. Generations of mathematicians have worked to prove the existence of Langlands’ hypothesized duality. Though they have only managed to establish it… Continue reading Echoes of Electromagnetism Found in Number Theory
In the Milky Way’s Stars, a History of Violence
With the cleaving of the cosmos into a home galaxy and a larger universe, the study of our finite home — and how it exists within that universe — could begin in earnest. Now, a century later, astronomers are still making unexpected discoveries about the only cosmic island we’ll ever inhabit. They may be able… Continue reading In the Milky Way’s Stars, a History of Violence