Quanta
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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.
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Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions
Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes.
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Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life
New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community.
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How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute
Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are beginning to understand why.