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Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement
Mathematicians are using topological abstractions to find places where it’s hard to vote.
Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness
The French mathematician spent decades developing a set of tools now widely used for taming random processes.
Doubts Grow About the Biosignature Approach to Alien-Hunting
Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.
Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Explain Value of Shock Therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy is highly effective in treating major depressive disorder, but no one knows why it works. New research suggests it may restore balance between excitation and inhibition in the brain.
Physicists Finally Find a Problem for Quantum Computers Alone
Researchers have shown that a problem relating to the energy of a quantum system is easy for quantum computers but hard for classical ones.
Fresh X-Rays Reveal a Universe as Clumpy as Cosmology Predicts
By mapping the largest structures in the universe in X-rays, cosmologists have found striking agreement with their standard theoretical model of how the universe evolves.
Mollusk Eyes Reveal How Future Evolution Depends on the Past
The visual systems of an obscure group of mollusks provide a rare natural example of path-dependent evolution, in which a critical fork in the creatures’ past determined their evolutionary futures.
How Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better
Erasing key information during training results in machine learning models that can learn new languages faster and more easily.
Complex Structures Like ‘Entropy Bagels’ Emerge From Simple Rules
Simple rules in simple settings continue to puzzle mathematicians, even as they devise intricate tools to analyze them.