Quanta
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Machine Intelligence Cracks Genetic Controls
Every cell in your body reads the same genome, the DNA-encoded instruction set that builds proteins. But your cells couldn’t be more different. Neurons send electrical messages, liver cells break […]
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Prime Gap Grows After Decades-Long Lull
A year after tackling how close together prime number pairs can stay, mathematicians have now made the first major advance in 76 years in understanding how far apart primes can […]
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A Common Logic to Seeing Cats and Cosmos
There may be a universal logic to how physicists, computers and brains tease out important features from among other irrelevant bits of data.
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Ancient Survivors Could Redefine Sex
If all the animals on Earth could offer a single lesson for long-term survival, it might be this: Sex works. Out of the estimated 8 million animal species, all but […]
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Multiverse Collisions May Dot the Sky
Early in cosmic history, our universe may have bumped into another — a primordial clash that could have left traces in the Big Bang’s afterglow.
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In a Multiverse, What Are the Odds?
Testing the multiverse hypothesis requires measuring whether our universe is statistically typical among the infinite variety of universes. But infinity does a number on statistics.
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At the Far Ends of a New Universal Law
A potent theory has emerged explaining a mysterious statistical law that arises throughout physics and mathematics.