Archive

Today Google announced that it achieved “quantum supremacy.” Its chief quantum computing rival, IBM, said it hasn’t. The disagreement hinges on what the term really means.

Researchers have discovered a surprising mathematical relationship in the brain’s representations of sensory information, with possible applications to AI research.

A major advance toward solving the 60-year-old sunflower conjecture is shedding light on how order begins to appear as random systems grow in size.

A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. But it's also revealed how far AI has to go.

Studies suggest that epigenetics allows some learned adaptive responses to be passed down to new generations. The question is how.

The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and shape theories of cosmology.

Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior.

Two monumental works have led many mathematicians to avoid the equal sign. The process has not always gone smoothly.

John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing lithium-ion batteries, "the hidden workhorses of the mobile era."