“There has to be some kind of triage to remember what is relevant and forget the rest,” Zugaro said. “Understanding how specific memories were selected for storage was still lacking … Now we have a good clue.” Last December, a research team led by Bendor at University College London published related results in Nature Communications … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Say you want to send a private message, cast a secret vote, or sign a document securely. If you do any of these tasks on a computer, you’re relying on encryption to keep your data safe. That encryption needs to withstand attacks from code breakers … Read more
Robert Brandenberger, a physicist at McGill University who was not involved with the study, said the new paper “sets a new standard of rigor for the analysis” of the mathematics of the beginning of time. In some cases, what appears at first to be a singularity—a point in space-time where mathematical descriptions lose their meaning—may … Read more
“What we have here is something incredibly simple,” said Tianwei Wu, the study’s lead author. “We can reprogram it, changing the laser patterns on the fly.” The researchers used the system to design a neural network that successfully discriminated vowel sounds. Most photonic systems need to be trained before they’re built, since training necessarily involves … Read more
Posing a far greater challenge for AI researchers was the game of Diplomacy—a favorite of politicians like John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. Instead of just two opponents, the game features seven players whose motives can be hard to read. To win, a player must negotiate, forging cooperative arrangements that anyone could breach at any … Read more
If or when SLAC’s planned project, the Light Dark Matter Experiment (LDMX), receives funding—a decision from the Department of Energy is expected in the next year or so—it will scan for light dark matter. The experiment is designed to accelerate electrons toward a target made of tungsten in End Station A. In the vast majority … Read more
A group led by string theory veterans Burt Ovrut of the University of Pennsylvania and Andre Lukas of Oxford went further. They too started with Ruehle’s metric-calculating software, which Lukas had helped develop. Building on that foundation, they added an array of 11 neural networks to handle the different types of sprinkles. These networks allowed … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Ever since viruses came to light in the late 1800s, scientists have set them apart from the rest of life. Viruses were far smaller than cells, and inside their protein shells they carried little more than genes. They could not grow, copy their own genes, … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Our sun is the best-observed star in the entire universe. We see its light every day. For centuries, scientists have tracked the dark spots dappling its radiant face, while in recent decades, telescopes in space and on Earth have scrutinized sunbeams in wavelengths spanning the … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In October, a Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The $5 billion mission is designed to find out if Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, can support life. But because Europa is constantly bombarded by intense … Read more
