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Why the Key to a Mathematical Life is Collaboration

July 28, 2025

Fan Chung, who has an Erdős number of 1, discusses the importance of connection — both human and mathematical.

The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus

July 11, 2025

Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ready to study dark matter and dark energy in unprecedented detail.

Q&A

How AI Models Are Helping to Understand — and Control — the Brain

June 18, 2025

Martin Schrimpf is crafting bespoke AI models that can induce control over high-level brain activity.

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How Paradoxical Questions and Simple Wonder Lead to Great Science

May 28, 2025

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.”

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Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences

May 9, 2025

The physicist Sidney Nagel delights in solving mysteries of the universe that are hiding in plain sight.

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Improving Deep Learning With a Little Help From Physics

April 23, 2025

Rose Yu has a plan for how to make AI better, faster and smarter — and it’s already yielding results.

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Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us.

April 9, 2025

The mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is using category theory to try to understand both human and AI-generated language.

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The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI

February 28, 2025

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.

The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA

February 5, 2025

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

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