Mathematicians Complete Quest to Build 'Spherical Cubes' By JORDANA CEPELEWICZ Is it possible to fill space "cubically" with shapes that act like spheres? A proof at the intersection of geometry and theoretical computer science says yes.
Read the article | | | | |  | How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities By CHARLIE WOOD Richard Feynman's path integral is both a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy about how the world is. But physicists are still struggling to figure out how to use it, and what it means.
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How Mathematical 'Hocus-Pocus'
Saved Particle Physics
By Charlie Wood (2020) |  | Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning By STEVE NADIS "Liquid" neural nets, based on a simple worm's nervous system, can transform their underlying algorithms on the fly. Their flexibility gives them unprecedented speed and adaptability.
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The Physics Principle That
Inspired Modern AI Art
By Anil Ananthaswamy | |  | What Lights the Universe's Standard Candles? By LYNDIE CHIOU Type Ia supernovas are astronomers' best tools for measuring cosmic distances. In a first, researchers have managed to re-create one on a supercomputer, giving a boost to a leading hypothesis for how they form.
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|  | The Joy of Asking About Infinity, Jellyfish and the End of the Universe By POLLY STRYKER As The Joy of Why podcast returns for a second season, producer Polly Stryker and host Steven Strogatz invite listeners to join them and their brilliant new guests on another voyage of discovery.
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Listen to the Season 2 trailer | | Tension Over Smoothness
By collating several astronomical huge datasets, cosmologists have compiled the most detailed map yet of all the matter in the universe, reports Camille Carlisle for Sky & Telescope. It points to a new tension, or discrepancy, between theory and observation: The universe isn't as clumpy as it should be. This "sigma-8" tension — as well as the more famous Hubble tension over the universe's expansion rate — suggests that our cosmological model is incomplete. As Charlie Wood reported for Quanta in 2020, most efforts to resolve one tension worsen the other.
Big Surprise in a Small Package
In a surprising discovery, researchers found that some bacteria encase their DNA in proteins called histones, reports Heidi Ledford for Nature. Until recently, scientists didn't think bacteria even had these proteins. Histones package DNA in complex cells, too — but in them, the DNA spools around the proteins rather than being encased. In 2021, Viviane Callier wrote for Quanta about how histones could help us understand the origins of complex eukaryotic life. | | | |
