Tag: Quantum Stuff

November 7, 2024 4 min read Parents Labeling a Kid’s Friend a Bad Influence Can Backfire Is your kid in trouble? Blaming their friends is ill advised By Francine Russo edited by Gary Stix Olga Rolenko/Getty Images Parents have always blamed their teens’ misbehavior on their kids’ friends: they may say their kids “fell into… Continue reading Parents Labeling a Kid’s Friend a Bad Influence Can Backfire

Learning a language can’t be that hard — every baby in the world manages to do it in a few years. Figuring out how the process works is another story. Linguists have devised elaborate theories to explain it, but recent advances in machine learning have added a new wrinkle. When computer scientists began building the… Continue reading Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way.

November 7, 2024 5 min read Rainwater Could Help Satisfy AI’s Water Demands A few dozen ChatGPT queries cost a bottle’s worth of water. Tech firms should consider simpler solutions, such as harvesting rainwater, to meet AI’s needs By Justin Talbot Zorn & Bettina Warburg edited by Ben Guarino In late September Microsoft announced that… Continue reading Rainwater Could Help Satisfy AI’s Water Demands

Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter Higgs first proposed the existence of the Higgs boson; nearly 50 years later, the particle was discovered at the Large… Continue reading The Physicist Decoding the Nonbinary Nature of the Subatomic World

Next, to see whether the links were in fact nanotubes, they performed versions of the now-canonical experiments with green fluorescent protein and calcein described by Ben-Yehuda and Dubey. The networked cells lit up. The team also confirmed that the links were indeed made of membrane lipids and not protein, which would instead suggest pili. They… Continue reading The Ocean Teems With Networks of Interconnected Bacteria

In June 1978, the organizers of a large mathematics conference in Marseille, France, announced a last-minute addition to the program. During the lunch hour, the mathematician Roger Apéry would present a proof that one of the most famous numbers in mathematics — “zeta of 3,” or ζ(3), as mathematicians write it — could not be… Continue reading Rational or Not? This Basic Math Question Took Decades to Answer.

Former President Donald Trump’s election victory and looming return to the White House will likely bring changes that scale back the nation’s public health insurance programs — increasing the uninsured rate, while imposing new barriers to abortion and other reproductive care. The reverberations will be felt far beyond Washington, D.C., and could include an erosion… Continue reading Trump’s Administration Will Attack Health Care from Multiple Angles

The pair had initially accepted each other, but that was only the first step. Giger patiently waited, and then saw what he was looking for under the microscope: The bacteria had wiggled their way into the fungal spores to hitchhike to the next generation. “I had to make sure the signal was the real deal,… Continue reading Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life

The neuron, the specialized cell type that makes up much of our brains, is at the center of today’s neuroscience. Neuroscientists explain perception, memory, cognition and even consciousness itself as products of billions of these tiny neurons busily firing their tiny “spikes” of voltage inside our brain. These energetic spikes not only convey things like… Continue reading Consciousness Might Hide in Our Brain’s Electric Fields

This episode is part of “Health Equity Heroes,” an editorially independent special project that was produced with financial support from Takeda Pharmaceuticals. Rachel Feltman: According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least one in five U.S. adults in each state are categorized as, quote, unquote, “living with obesity.” But for… Continue reading The Weight Debate in Health Care