Category: Quantum Stuff

Plasticity differs from evolution because it happens within an individual’s lifetime. Understanding a polyp’s adjustments can therefore help biologists grasp the limits of adaptation in an era of unprecedented change. How quickly does coral grow? How densely can polyps pack together? What shapes do colonies assume to adapt to different environments? What’s the minimum number… Continue reading The ‘Elegant’ Math Model That Could Help Rescue Coral Reefs

Men are struggling—at least, that’s what many headlines suggest. Compared with women, they report having fewer and less supportive friendships. Men lag behind dramatically in achievements such as higher education attainment. Suicide rates, too, reveal a grim gender disparity: women attempt suicide more often, but men are far more likely to die by it. Concerns… Continue reading The Hidden Costs of Men’s Social Isolation

Cancer arises as an enemy from within. One of the body’s own cells becomes damaged or corrupted and then multiplies to create copies of its aberrant self. The ballooning army of deviant cells may invade nearby tissues, damaging them and causing symptoms. Deepening the betrayal, the body itself becomes complicit. Blood vessels grow toward the… Continue reading Tumors Hijack the Nervous System to Fuel Their Own Growth

CLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration fired federal employees on probationary status Thursday, affecting tens of thousands of staffers nationwide. The Department of Energy, Forest Service and Office of Personnel Management are among the agencies that axed staffers, several current and former federal employees said. All agency employees for this story were granted anonymity because they… Continue reading Trump Administration Starts Firing Energy Department and Other Employees

He tweaked a machine learning technique called a hidden Markov model so it would work with fMRI data. The algorithm can be trained to recognize structure for events that stretch out over time, such as an episode of a TV show. The approach, borrowed from computer science, was new to neuroimaging. “That gave me a… Continue reading How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories

The breakthrough came months later, when Buhrman was visiting his frequent collaborator Richard Cleve at the University of Waterloo. They decided to focus on an extreme scenario, one where the full memory is very large. If a computer with little free memory can access this massive full memory, would that enable it to solve problems… Continue reading Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive

After the conjecture was posed in the 1970s, dozens of mathematicians tried their hand at proving it. They made partial progress — and in the process they learned a great deal about groups, which are abstract objects that describe the various symmetries of a mathematical system. But a full proof seemed out of reach. Then… Continue reading After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem

Together, Krapivin (now a graduate student at the University of Cambridge), Farach-Colton (now at New York University) and Kuszmaul demonstrated in a January 2025 paper that this new hash table can indeed find elements faster than was considered possible. ln so doing, they had disproved a conjecture long held to be true. “It’s an important… Continue reading Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

In a spin chain, that motion is waves like those seen at stadiums. Flip one atom, and it will flip its neighbors, who will flip their neighbors, and so on. These waves are still extremely complicated; when two waves ripple through the same stretch of particles, any particle can flip any other particle, leading to… Continue reading How Hans Bethe Stumbled Upon Perfect Quantum Theories