Quanta

[:es]In applying game theory to biology and human behavior, have scientists focused too much on competition over cooperation?[:]

[:es]The computer scientist Christoph Salge is trying to circumvent the need for rules that guide robots’ behavior. His strategy: Give them a goal of making us more powerful.[:]

[:es]Physicists theorize that a new “traversable” kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.[:]

[:es]Studies of the energy-harvesting proteins in primitive cells suggest that key features of photosynthesis might have evolved a billion years earlier than scientists thought.[:]

[:es]Simple math can help scheming politicians manipulate district maps and cruise to victory. But it can also help identify and fix the problem.[:]

[:es]The real-world version of the famous “traveling salesman problem” finally gets a good-enough solution.[:]

[:es]Mitonuclear conflict — a struggle between the genes in a cell’s nucleus and those in its mitochondria — might sometimes split species in two. 1[:]

[:es]The universe has not cooperated with physicists’ hopes. In desperation, many are looking for new ways to search for surprises at the Large Hadron Collider.[:]

[:es]A new idea called the “information bottleneck” is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn.[:]