Category: Quantum Stuff

In 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing came up with an idea for a universal computer. It was a simple device: an infinite strip of tape covered in zeros and ones, together with a machine that could move back and forth along the tape, changing zeros to ones and vice versa according to some set… Continue reading How to Build an Origami Computer

The wild Arabidopsis, like most plants, has air channels between its cells. These structures are like ventilation shafts woven around the sealed cellular compartments, and they are known to play important roles both in photosynthesis and in oxygenating cells. But the air channels of the mutant plant were flooded with water. The team tracked the… Continue reading Plants Find Light Using Gaps Between Their Cells

We tend to think of mathematics as purely logical, but the teaching of math, its values, its usefulness and its workings are packed with nuance. So what is “good” mathematics? In 2007, the mathematician Terence Tao wrote an essay for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society that sought to answer this question. Today, as… Continue reading What Makes for ‘Good’ Mathematics?

Since then, scientists have wrestled with one striking characteristic of lambda: Its estimated value of 10−122 in Planck units is “the smallest measured parameter in physics,” said Cumrun Vafa, a physicist at Harvard University. In 2022, while considering that almost unfathomable smallness with two members of his research team — Miguel Montero, now at Madrid’s… Continue reading In a ‘Dark Dimension,’ Physicists Search for Missing Matter

Then he found something more surprising. Ignoring the actual gene sequences, he looked directly at the molecular breakdown of a strain’s DNA. In the double helix of DNA, the four types of bases in the opposing strands are paired, with guanine (G) bound to cytosine (C) and thymine (T) bound to adenine (A). Unexpectedly, the… Continue reading The Quest for Simple Rules to Build a Microbial Community

In 1969, the British mathematician John Conway devised a beguilingly simple set of rules for creating complex behavior. His Game of Life, often referred to simply as Life, unfolds on an infinite square grid of cells. Each cell can be either “alive” or “dead.” The grid evolves over a series of turns (or “generations”), with… Continue reading Math’s ‘Game of Life’ Reveals Long-Sought Repeating Patterns

What might they be? Perhaps a new fundamental force field, Hill said, or interactions among dark matter particles that we don’t yet understand, or new ingredients that aren’t yet part of our description of the universe. Some new physics models tweak dark energy, adding a surge of cosmic acceleration in the early moments of the… Continue reading Clashing Cosmic Numbers Challenge Our Best Theory of the Universe

Artificial intelligence seems more powerful than ever, with chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT capable of producing uncannily humanlike text. But for all their talents, these bots still leave researchers wondering: Do such models actually understand what they are saying? “Clearly, some people believe they do,” said the AI pioneer Geoff Hinton in a recent conversation… Continue reading New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text