Quanta
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Big Advance on Simple-Sounding Math Problem Was a Century in the Making
A new proof about prime numbers illuminates the subtle relationship between addition and multiplication — and raises hopes for progress on the famous abc conjecture.
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When Data Is Missing, Scientists Guess. Then Guess Again.
Across the social and biological sciences, statisticians use a technique that leverages randomness to deal with the unknown.
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The Cellular Secret to Resisting the Pressure of the Deep Sea
Cell membranes from comb jellies reveal a new kind of adaptation to the deep sea: curvy lipids that conform to an ideal shape under pressure.
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The First Nuclear Clock Will Test if Fundamental Constants Change
An ultra-precise measurement of a transition in the hearts of thorium atoms gives physicists a tool to probe the forces that bind the universe.
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The Physics of Cold Water May Have Jump-Started Complex Life
When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments.
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What Is Machine Learning?
Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time.
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Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy
Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a critical missing piece of the galactic puzzle.
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The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges
The puzzle of emergence asks how regularities emerge on macro scales out of uncountable constituent parts. A new framework has researchers hopeful that a solution is near.
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Physicists Puzzle Over Emergence of Strange Electron Aggregates
Electrons have been seen uniting into entities with fractions of electric charge, this time without a magnetic field coaxing them into it.