A $1 million prize awaits anyone who can show where the math of fluid flow breaks down. With specially trained AI systems, ...

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means ...

Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? Researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they ...

Naomi Saphra thinks that most research into language models focuses too much on the finished product. She’s mining the history of their training for insights into why these systems work the way they ...

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry. “Anomalous” heat flow, which at first ...

For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise. In October 2018, David Asperó was on holiday in Italy, gazing out a car ...

It’s simple enough for AI to seem to comprehend data, but devising a true test of a machine’s knowledge has proved difficult. But has GPT-3 — trained on text from thousands of websites, books and ...

A new idea called the “information bottleneck” is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn. Even as ...

The most powerful formula in physics starts with a slender S, the symbol for a sort of sum known as an integral. Further along comes a second S, representing a quantity known as action. Together, ...

It can be tempting to assume that your intuitions about three-dimensional space carry over to higher-dimensional realms. After all, adding another dimension simply creates a new direction to move ...

Sau Lan Wu spent decades working to establish the Standard Model of particle physics. Now she’s searching for what lies beyond it. In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for ...