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A composite of 15 images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Each image has a glowing red dot — a young galaxy — in its center.
astrophysics

JWST Spots Giant Black Holes All Over the Early Universe

By Charlie Wood
August 14, 2023
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Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But recent James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts.

algorithms

Risky Giant Steps Can Solve Optimization Problems Faster

By Allison Parshall
August 11, 2023
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New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

A colorful picture of nested circles.
number theory

Two Students Unravel a Widely Believed Math Conjecture

By Max G. Levy
August 10, 2023
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Mathematicians thought they were on the cusp of proving a conjecture about the ancient structures known as Apollonian circles. But a summer project would lead to its downfall.

Illustration of a bacterial cell in mid-fission. Its threads of DNA and other internal molecules are divided between the cells. A constriction on the midline marks where the daughter cells are splitting.
evolution

Even Synthetic Life Forms With a Tiny Genome Can Evolve

By Yasemin Saplakoglu
August 9, 2023
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By watching “minimal” cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can be too simple to evolve.

astronomy

Exoplanets Could Help Us Learn How Planets Make Magnetism

By Jonathan O'Callaghan
August 7, 2023
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New observations of a faraway rocky world that might have its own magnetic field could help astronomers understand the seemingly haphazard magnetic fields swaddling our solar system’s planets.

The curling bodies of two differently colored roundworms overlap with a virus-shaped element in the background.
genomics

Selfish, Virus-Like DNA Can Carry Genes Between Species

By Saugat Bolakhe
August 3, 2023
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Genetic elements called Mavericks that have some viral features could be responsible for the large-scale smuggling of DNA between species.

Illustration of an astronaut opening a black hole to see another astronaut inside.
theoretical physics

New Calculations Show How to Escape Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox

By Charlie Wood
August 2, 2023
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Inside of a black hole, the two theoretical pillars of 20th-century physics appear to clash. Now a group of young physicists think they have resolved the conflict by appealing to the central pillar of the new century — the physics of quantum information.

set theory

Ninth Dedekind Number Found by Two Independent Groups

By Rachel Crowell
August 1, 2023
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The numbers count a variety of seemingly unrelated mathematical structures.

Quantized Columns

How Genetic Surprises Complicate the Old Doctrine of DNA

By C. Brandon Ogbunu
July 31, 2023
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For over a century, biologists have had to contend with a complicated picture of genetics, which they’ve only recently begun to understand.


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