Plus: Detailed coverage of this year's science Nobel Prizes

Math and Science News from Quanta Magazine View this email in your browser NEURAL NETWORKS | ALL TOPICS   Tiny Language Models Thrive With GPT-4 as a Teacher By BEN BRUBAKER To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic children's stories. Read the article OPTICS   Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize By CHARLIE WOOD The development of attosecond pulses of light allowed researchers to explore the frame-by-frame movement of electrons. Read the article Related:  Alchemy Arrives in a Burst of Light By Philip Ball (2020) IMMUNOLOGY   Nobel Prize Awarded to mRNA Vaccine Scientists By YASEMIN SAPLAKOGLU Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman made discoveries that led to the development of mRNA vaccines, such as those that protect against Covid-19. Read the article Related:  What Has Covid-19 Taught Us About Vaccines? From "The Joy of Why" podcast CHEMISTRY   Nobel Prize Honors Inventors of 'Quantum Dot' Nanoparticles By YASEMIN SAPLAKOGLU The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three researchers who harnessed the quantum behaviors of semiconductor nanocrystals. Read the article Related:  Qubits Can Be as Safe as Bits, Researchers Show By Mordechai Rorvig (2022) Around the Web It's a Vibe Baryon acoustic oscillations — fluctuations in the density of matter in the universe — started out tiny. Then, when the universe expanded, they grew to create the large-scale structure of the universe. For BBC, Patchen Barss explains what the fluctuations can tell us about inflation and dark energy. They are apparent in the ancient light emitted when our universe was just 380,000 years old. In 2020, Charlie Wood explained in Quanta how this "cosmic microwave background" reveals details about dark matter and dark energy. Bridge Construction The Langlands program connects seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics. The mathematician Edward Frenkel explains this pursuit of the "grand unified theory of mathematics" for Numberphile. In a 2022 video for Quanta, the mathematician Alex Kontorovich explained how the Langlands program has enabled novel solutions to old problems. Follow Quanta Unsubscribe | About Quanta | My Bookmarks Privacy Policy | Terms | Contact Us   Copyright © 2023 Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of the Simons Foundation Simons Foundation 160 5th Avenue, 7th Floor New York, NY 10010