NEUROSCIENCE | ALL TOPICS

Brain's 'Background Noise' May Explain Value of Shock Therapy

By ELIZABETH LANDAU

Electroconvulsive therapy is highly effective in treating major depressive disorder, but no one knows why it works. New research suggests it may restore balance between excitation and inhibition in the brain.

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NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute

By BEN BRUBAKER

Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are starting to understand why.

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Related:
Researchers Gain
New Understanding From Simple AI
By Mordechai Rorvig (2022)

ABEL PRIZE

Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness

By JORDANA CEPELEWICZ

The French mathematician spent decades developing a set of tools now widely used for taming random processes.

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Related:
Dennis Sullivan, Uniter of Topology
and Chaos, Wins the Abel Prize
By Jordana Cepelewicz (2023)

ASTROBIOLOGY

Doubts Grow About the Biosignature Approach to Alien-Hunting

By ELISE CUTTS

Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.

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QUANTA SCIENCE PODCAST

Echoes of Electromagnetism Found in Number Theory

By KEVIN HARTNETT;
Podcast hosted by SUSAN VALOT

A new magnum opus posits the existence of a hidden mathematical link akin to the connection between electricity and magnetism.

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QUANTIZED ACADEMY

Math That Connects Where We're Going to Where We've Been

By PATRICK HONNER

Recursion builds bridges between ideas from across different math classes and illustrates the power of creative mathematical thinking.

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Related:
The Astonishing Behavior
of Recursive Sequences
By Alex Stone (2023)

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Why Is This Basic Computer Science Problem So Hard?

Video by CHRISTOPHER WEBB YOUNG and EMILY BUDER

How can a programmer ensure a critical piece of software is bug-free? Theoretical computer scientists use a fundamental question called the reachability problem, which determines whether a computer will reach or avoid various dangerous states when running a program.

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