Category: Quantum Stuff

Astronomers Reveal New Details of How Stars Devour Planets

Astronomers have been witnessing the ends of worlds for millennia. Even in antiquity, sky watchers noted the rare star suddenly bursting into brightness and then fading away over months or years. These outbursts are supernovae, explosive stellar deaths that can also annihilate a star’s accompanying planets. Today modern researchers can see black holes shredding entire… Continue reading Astronomers Reveal New Details of How Stars Devour Planets

With AI, Astronomers Dig Up the Stars That Birthed the Milky Way

For around 20 years, astronomers have struggled to find an ancient group of stars mixed in with the gas, dust and newer stars of our galaxy’s bulge. These “fossil” stars preceded the Milky Way and should have been discernible by their distinctive chemistry and orbits. Yet until recently, only a small number of them had… Continue reading With AI, Astronomers Dig Up the Stars That Birthed the Milky Way

Animal Personalities Can Trip Up Science, But There’s a Solution

Several years ago, Christian Rutz started to wonder whether he was giving his crows enough credit. Rutz, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his team were capturing wild New Caledonian crows and challenging them with puzzles made from natural materials before releasing them again. In one test, birds faced a log… Continue reading Animal Personalities Can Trip Up Science, But There’s a Solution

Only Computers Can Solve This Map-Coloring Problem From the 1800s

One of the great episodes in the history of mathematics began on October 23, 1852. In a letter to Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Augustus De Morgan wrote, “A student of mine asked me today to give him a reason for a fact which I did not know was a fact — and do not yet.”… Continue reading Only Computers Can Solve This Map-Coloring Problem From the 1800s

How a DNA ‘Parasite’ May Have Fragmented Our Genes

Clément Gilbert, an evolutionary genomicist at Paris-Saclay University, thinks the aquatic bias in introners is an echo of what his group found in horizontal gene transfer events. In 2020, their work uncovered nearly 1,000 distinct horizontal transfers involving transposons that had occurred in over 300 vertebrate genomes. The vast majority of these transfers happened in… Continue reading How a DNA ‘Parasite’ May Have Fragmented Our Genes

Does GPT-4 Really Understand What We’re Saying?

Explore One question for David Krakauer, president of the Sante Fe Institute for complexity science where he explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. Photo courtesy of David Krakauer Does GPT-4 really understand what we’re saying? Yes and no,” is the answer to that. In my new paper with computer scientist Melanie Mitchell,… Continue reading Does GPT-4 Really Understand What We’re Saying?

What Does ChatGPT Know About Science?

Unless you’ve been completely off the grid lately, you’ve heard about or met ChatGPT, the popular chatbot that first went online in November 2022 and was updated in March. Type in a question, comment, or command, as I’ve done, and it quickly produces a human-seeming response in good English for any topic. The system comes… Continue reading What Does ChatGPT Know About Science?

Humans Are Overzealous Whale Morticians

Explore When, at the dawn of the 19th century, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traversed western North America, they encountered a wondrous bestiary: the “fleet and delicately formed” coyote, the “bear of enormous size” which we call the grizzly. Yet few creatures impressed them more than the “Buzzard or Vulture” their party captured near the… Continue reading Humans Are Overzealous Whale Morticians