3+ hour, 2+ min ago  (802+ words) The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We're so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point…...

4+ day, 2+ min ago  (815+ words) AlphaFold, the artificial intelligence system developed by Google DeepMind, has just turned five. Over the past few years, we've periodically reported on its successes; last year, it won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. To understand what the next five years…...

6+ day, 22+ hour ago  (348+ words) The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The Air Force tasked Dantzig with figuring out new ways to solve optimization problems such as these. In response, he invented the simplex method, an algorithm that drew on some…...

2+ week, 3+ hour ago  (664+ words) The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Ga'per Begu', a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. Recursion can occur at the beginning or end of a sentence, but the form that is most challenging to master,…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago  (444+ words) While AI transforms subjective work like content creation and data summarization, executives rightfully hesitate to use it when facing objective, high-stakes determinations that have clear right and wrong answers, such as contract interpretation, regulatory compliance, or logical workflow validation. Neuro-symbolic…...

3+ week, 5+ hour ago  (338+ words) The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Researchers have developed an AI system that learns about the world via videos and demonstrates a notion of "surprise" when presented with information that goes against the knowledge it has…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (1485+ words) The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1876, Peter Guthrie Tait set out to measure what he called the "beknottedness" of knots. If two knots have different unknotting numbers, then they must be different. But Tait found…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago  (429+ words) In the summer of 1956, a group of academics'now we'd call them computer scientists but there was no such thing then'met on Dartmouth College campus in New Hampshire to discuss how to make machines think like humans. One of them, John…...

2+ mon, 4+ day ago  (288+ words) Google has come up with a way to better map Earth's disasters, predict them, and be able to track which communities and ecosystems are going to be harmed. If you want to find out what's straining the environment in your…...

2+ mon, 2+ week ago  (719+ words) Whether your chip is running a vintage computer game or the latest DeepSeek model, it'll reward you for speaking its native language. Certain programming languages, like Python or Go or C++, are called "high-level" because they work sort of like…...