Quanta
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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.
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AI Needs Enormous Computing Power. Could Light-Based Chips Help?
Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also face major obstacles.
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New AI Tools Predict How Life’s Building Blocks Assemble
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes.