Tag: Quantum Stuff

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

February 14, 2025 3 min read The Psychology of ‘Shared Silence’ in Couples The right kind of silence can be golden, revitalizing and strengthening a relationship By Francine Russo & Knowable Magazine Partners enjoy a companionable moment of separate activities. A couple sits together on a sunny park bench. He appears to be studying the… Continue reading The Psychology of ‘Shared Silence’ in Couples

In 1992, Joseph Gerver of Rutgers University proposed a particularly clever curved shape with an area of approximately 2.2195. Mathematicians suspected that it answered Moser’s question. But they couldn’t prove it. Now a young postdoctoral researcher has. In a 119-page paper, Jineon Baek of Yonsei University in Seoul showed that Gerver’s sofa is the largest… Continue reading The Largest Sofa You Can Move Around a Corner

Sonya Stokes, an emergency room physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, braces herself for a daily deluge of patients sick with coughs, soreness, fevers, vomiting, and other flu-like symptoms. She’s desperate for information, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a critical source of urgent analyses of the flu and other public health… Continue reading Urgent CDC Data on Influenza and Bird Flu Go Missing as Outbreaks Escalate