Category: Quantum Stuff

It’s surprising because they would be the only organisms on Earth to do this. There are many metabolic processes that go in the forward direction and the reverse direction. That is something that life uses quite a bit just to be more efficient with our enzymes. But the idea that your respiration — what you… Continue reading The Pursuit of Life Where It Seems Unimaginable

Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries. In a wide-ranging conversation with co-host Janna Levin, Prum traces the deep evolutionary origins of feathers, which he argues first… Continue reading Do Beautiful Birds Have an Evolutionary Advantage?

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. There are a few animals that pretty much everyone likes: fluffy pandas, cute kittens and regal tigers. Dolphins would probably make the list for most folks; they’re intelligent, playful and have that permanent smile on their face. Watching them darting around in the water kind… Continue reading An AI-Assisted Chat with Dolphins

An astonishing fact known for only the past few decades is that every big galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its heart. Scientists suspected this was the case in the 1980s, and observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, which has peered deep into the cores of galaxies all across the sky,… Continue reading Hypervelocity Stars Hint at a Supermassive Black Hole Just outside the Milky Way

But just how much harder? In 1962, the mathematician Tibor Radó invented a new way to explore this question through what he called the busy beaver game. To play, start by choosing a specific number of rules — call that number n. Your goal is to find the n-rule Turing machine that runs the longest… Continue reading Busy Beaver Hunters Reach Numbers That Overwhelm Ordinary Math

Because these brain areas are difficult to study — due not only to their location, but also to their composition, with many different cell types and crisscrossed circuitry — it’s only in the last decade or so that neuroscientists have begun to understand how thirst fundamentally works. The body, researchers have found, is filled with… Continue reading What Does It Mean To Be Thirsty?

If there’s an upside to this fragility, it’s that the new work exposes what happens when you steer a model toward the unexpected, Hooker said. Large AI models, in a way, have shown their hand in ways never seen before. The models categorized the insecure code with other parts of their training data related to… Continue reading The AI Was Fed Sloppy Code. It Turned Into Something Evil.

Their techniques aren’t just promising for analyzing models of electron behavior like Anderson’s. The work also taps into a longtime quest to understand systems that aren’t entirely random or entirely ordered. “I’m actually very excited,” said Horng-Tzer Yau of Harvard University, who has been working on the problem for most of his career. When it… Continue reading New Physics-Inspired Proof Probes the Borders of Disorder

“That’s just freaking awesome. It’s a really clever thing,” Glotzer said. “Until now, no one has ever successfully tried to do DFT calculations on something that wasn’t periodic.” Michael Widom, a physicist at Carnegie Mellon University, said the stability result might help explain how quasicrystals form in the first place. “It answers a fundamental question.… Continue reading Quasicrystals Spill Secrets of Their Formation

Ruthenium-100, in particular, would have made it into the core during Earth’s formation. Then, later in the planet’s history, a swarm of meteors bombarded the surface. Based on meteorite samples, this added various other isotopes of ruthenium to the crust and mantle. With no more liquid iron precipitating downward, these other isotopes couldn’t reach the… Continue reading Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface