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Improving Deep Learning With a Little Help From Physics

April 23, 2025

Rose Yu has a plan for how to make AI better, faster and smarter — and it’s already yielding results.

How a Biofilm’s Strange Shape Emerges From Cellular Geometry

April 21, 2025

Micro decisions can have macro consequences. A soft matter physicist reveals how interactions within simple cellular collectives can lead to emergent physical traits.

New Proof Settles Decades-Old Bet About Connected Networks

April 18, 2025

According to mathematical legend, Peter Sarnak and Noga Alon made a bet about optimal graphs in the late 1980s. They’ve now both been proved wrong.

Can Quantum Gravity Be Created in the Lab?

April 17, 2025

Quantum gravity could help physicists unite the currently incompatible worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity. In this episode, Monika Schleier-Smith discusses her pioneering experimental approach, using laser-cooled atoms to explore whether gravity could emerge from quantum entanglement.

A Pacinian corpuscle neuron, reconstructed using focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy, looks like a thick tree root with 15,000 fingerlike extensions growing from it.

Touch, Our Most Complex Sense, Is a Landscape of Cellular Sensors

Every soft caress of wind, searing burn and seismic rumble is detected by our skin’s tangle of touch sensors. David Ginty has spent his career cataloging the neurons beneath everyday sensations.

To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language

April 14, 2025

We insist that large language models repeatedly translate their mathematical processes into words. There may be a better way.

‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle

April 11, 2025

A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles — a new category of quantum particle — could be created in exotic materials.

Q&A

Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us.

April 9, 2025

The mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is using category theory to try to understand both human and AI-generated language.

Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals

April 7, 2025

Complex neural pathways likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

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