Category: Quantum Stuff

The trio ended up establishing a kind of dictionary translating between fairness tools and ideas in complexity theory. They showed that any population — whether it’s days to be forecast or applicants awaiting loans — could be translated into a landscape of possible inputs for a computational problem. With the connections established, the researchers showed… Continue reading The Question of What’s Fair Illuminates the Question of What’s Hard

Would Rosas’ scheme help to understand the emergence of robust, large-scale structure in a case like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot? The huge vortex “might satisfy computational closure” Rosas said, “but we’d need to do a proper analysis before being able to claim anything.” As for living organisms, they seem sometimes to be emergent but sometimes… Continue reading The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges

In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career: Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn’t “can you read music?” It’s “can you hear it?” Can you hear the music, Robert? Oppenheimer: Yes, I can. I can’t hear the algebra, but I feel the machine. I felt the machine even… Continue reading Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try

Last month, researchers discovered cells in the brainstem that regulate inflammation throughout the body. In response to an injury, these nerve cells not only sense inflammatory molecules, but also dial their circulating levels up and down to keep infections from harming healthy tissues. The discovery adds control of the immune system to the brainstem’s core… Continue reading The Brainstem Fine-Tunes Inflammation Throughout the Body

The colder that water gets, the smaller this energy barrier gets. This makes it easier for random molecular motions to push a tiny embryonic ice structure over the critical size threshold. Ice forms and grows, and the lower-energy crystal structure stays stable. Boosting Nucleation Surfaces and impurities can dramatically lower the energy barrier for nucleation… Continue reading The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes

Then the team stumbled across a clue by accident. One summer evening, Bogdziewicz was sitting on his balcony reading a study which found that the timing of leaf senescence — the natural aging process leaves go through each autumn — depends on when the local weather warms relative to the summer solstice. Inspired by this… Continue reading Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun

In 2012, a group of researchers at Tsinghua University in China created a metallic film from a mix of elements — bismuth, antimony and tellurium, with a dash of chromium to provide an effective internal magnetic field. When the Tsinghua group ran a current through the film, without any external magnetic field, the characteristic integer… Continue reading Physicists Puzzle Over Emergence of Strange Electron Aggregates