metazine

For the first time in 30 years, computer scientists have found a better way to allocate objects evenly between two groups.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition.

No one yet knows which technology will power the quantum computers of the future, but the race to create them has already produced some of science’s most intricate machinery.

From the 1800s to the early 2000s, physicists used the same theory to understand the behavior of fluids. Now, using a modern insight, they have redefined fluids from the bottom up.

By deciphering the molecular signatures of millions of mouse cells, Junyue Cao has found that aging is not haphazard wear and tear but rather a “remodeling of the cell society. ”

The math, which combines chaos, quantum theory, and infinitely complex fractal structures, has been called a “foundational result. ”

A simple scaling law brings order to the chaos of flowing water, rock, and sediment. New findings have extended the law even further.

A global constellation of neutrino detectors is creating a never-before-seen view of the radioactive elements that power Earth’s tectonic heat engine.

Neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor discusses efforts to understand how skin contact can be painful or pleasurable, and what touch-obsessed naked mole rats might teach us about human social behavior.

New research is helping biologists understand how an overlooked aspect of coral physiology may affect their fate under climate change.

AI’s greatest mathematical successes have come from answers to problems posed by a mid-20th century iconoclast. By examining what makes the Erdős problems unique, mathematicians are trying to understand how AI might change the rest of math.

The idea that artificial intelligence can “reason” is more intuitive than ever. But intuitions can be wrong, and the science is far from settled.

New calculations seem to have put a 25-year-old particle physics puzzle to rest. But they’ve also created a clash with other experimental results.

An organelle discovered inside a microbe inside a cow’s gut helps explain how livestock burps contribute to warming our planet.