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A Number Theorist Who Bridges Math and Time
...probably more than my fair share of them.” He was especially surprised to win the Fields Medal because much of his recent work has been highly conjectural, and the medal...
To Heal Some Wounds, Adult Cells Turn More Fetal
...In recent years, moreover, it’s become clear that those aren’t the only cells that stay flexible: Sometimes, when the repair process calls for it, more specialized cells can take a...
The Last of the Universe’s Ordinary Matter Has Been Found
For decades, astronomers weren’t able to find all of the atomic matter in the universe. A series of recent papers has revealed where it’s been hiding. Astronomers have finally found...
New Proof Shows Infinite Curves Come in Two Types
...centuries, and that have increased in importance in recent decades. “We’ve been thinking about this for over 1,000 years, and now we have some probabilistic sense about [elliptic curves]. That’s...
How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
The brain can’t directly encode the passage of time, but recent work hints at a workaround for putting timestamps on memories of events. It began about a decade ago at...
New Turmoil Over Predicting the Effects of Genes
...threads of “nature” and “nurture” — that is, about determining the extent to which genes alone can explain differences within and between populations. But two recent studies are now calling...
Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning
A recent challenge to Stephen Hawking’s biggest idea — about how the universe might have come from nothing — has cosmologists choosing sides. In 1981, many of the world’s leading...
Philosophers Debate New ‘Sonic Black Hole’ Discovery
Opinions differ about what recent measurements of a sound-trapping fluid reveal about light-trapping black holes. Last month, a team of physicists reported in Nature that a sound-trapping fluid, analogous to...
How Randomness Can Make Math Easier
...isn’t random that the whole enterprise of mathematics is possible. Yet the recent Quanta article “Random Surfaces Hide an Intricate Order” concerned a new proof in which randomness made all...