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Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand?
A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. But it's also revealed how far AI has to go.
Inherited Learning? It Happens, but How Is Uncertain
Studies suggest that epigenetics allows some learned adaptive responses to be passed down to new generations. The question is how.
How the Neutrino’s Tiny Mass Could Help Solve Big Mysteries
The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and shape theories of cosmology.
How Randomness Can Arise From Determinism
Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior.
With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes From Equality
Two monumental works have led many mathematicians to avoid the equal sign. The process has not always gone smoothly.
Nobel Awarded for Lithium-Ion Batteries and Portable Power
John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing lithium-ion batteries, "the hidden workhorses of the mobile era."
Physics Nobel Honors Early Universe and Exoplanet Discoveries
The astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The cosmologist James Peebles won the other half for work exploring the structure of the universe.
Nobel Prize Awarded for Discoveries on How Cells Adapt to Oxygen
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine honored William Kaelin Jr., Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza for their work on elucidating how cells adjust to low oxygen levels.
Cell-Bacteria Mergers Offer Clues to How Organelles Evolved
Cells in symbiotic partnership, sometimes nested one within the other and functioning like organelles, can borrow from their host’s genes to complete their own metabolic pathways.