Latest Articles

A Backdoor Lets the Immune System Monitor the Brain

April 28, 2021

A newfound hub of immune system activity at the back of the brain solves a century-old puzzle.

Cosmic Map of Ultrahigh-Energy Particles Points to Long-Hidden Treasures

April 27, 2021

Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays twist and turn on their way to Earth, which has made it nearly impossible to identify the colossal monsters that create them.

Emery Brown and the Truth About Anesthesia

April 26, 2021

Anesthesia is very different from sleep — which is why it offers unique opportunities for studying the human brain, says the physician-researcher and statistician Emery Brown.

New Proof Reveals That Graphs With No Pentagons Are Fundamentally Different

April 26, 2021

Researchers have proved a special case of the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture, which shows what happens in graphs that exclude anything resembling a pentagon.

How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists

April 22, 2021

The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.

DNA of Giant ‘Corpse Flower’ Parasite Surprises Biologists

April 21, 2021

The bizarre genome of the world’s most mysterious flowering plants shows how far parasites will go in stealing, deleting and duplicating DNA.

The Puzzling Power of Simple Arithmetic

April 20, 2021

Playing with arithmetic can lead us to unexpected and profound discoveries that point toward deeper mathematics and sometimes even deeper science.

Melanie Mitchell Takes AI Research Back to Its Roots

April 19, 2021

To build a general artificial intelligence, we may need to know more about our own minds, argues the computer scientist Melanie Mitchell.

Latest Neural Nets Solve World’s Hardest Equations Faster Than Ever Before

April 19, 2021

Two new approaches allow deep neural networks to solve entire families of partial differential equations, making it easier to model complicated systems and to do so orders of magnitude faster.

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