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A new idea is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn.
Computer scientists are finding ways to code curiosity into intelligent machines.
Hybrids, once treated as biological misfits, play a vital role in the evolution of many animal species. Now conservationists are trying to reconcile that truth with policies.
The mathematician Svitlana Mayboroda and collaborators have figured out how to predict the behavior of electrons — a mathematical discovery that could have immediate practical effects.
Textbooks say that the moon was formed after a Mars-size mass smashed the young Earth. But new evidence has cast doubt on that story, leaving researchers to dream up new ways to get a giant rock into orbit.
John Nash’s notion of equilibrium is ubiquitous in economic theory, but a new study shows that it is often impossible to reach efficiently.
A French mathematician has completed the classification of all convex pentagons, and therefore all convex polygons, that tile the plane.
If gut bacteria can sway their hosts to be selfless, it could answer a riddle that goes back to Darwin.
A different kind of dark matter could help to resolve an old celestial conundrum.