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How Hans Bethe Stumbled Upon Perfect Quantum Theories
Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences.
Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture
A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.
How Noether’s Theorem Revolutionized Physics
Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights continue to shape physics.
The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA
By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

New Proofs Probe the Limits of Mathematical Truth
By proving a broader version of Hilbert’s famous 10th problem, two groups of mathematicians have expanded the realm of mathematical unknowability.
Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations
Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities.
How Does Life Happen When There’s Barely Any Light?
Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature.
Cosmologists Try a New Way to Measure the Shape of the Universe
Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more complex? We can’t say for sure, but a new search strategy is mapping out the subtle signals that could reveal if the universe has a shape.
New Book-Sorting Algorithm Almost Reaches Perfection
The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal.