The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for …
“How are matter and energy distributed?” asked Peter Schweitzer, a theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut. “We don’t know.” Schweitzer has spent most of his career thinking about the …
The third factor is the probability of a lifeless planet producing the observed signal—an equally serious challenge, researchers now realize, that’s tangled up in the problem of unconceived abiotic alternatives. …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list …
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Whenever you’re actively performing a task—say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam—the parts of your brain …
But there may be opportunities to indirectly spot the signatures of those gravitons. One strategy Vafa and his collaborators are pursuing draws on large-scale cosmological surveys that chart the distribution …
His group decided to find out. They built the new, diversified version of AlphaZero, which includes multiple AI systems that trained independently and on a variety of situations. The algorithm …