Archive

By making use of randomness, a team has created a simple algorithm for estimating large numbers of distinct objects in a stream of data.

Mathematicians have disproved a major conjecture about the relationship between curvature and shape.

How do immature egg cells maintain genetic quality for decades before they mature? Scientists find unusual safeguards in this quiescent cell that may inform research into fertility.

Researchers are drawing on ideas from game theory to improve large language models and make them more consistent.

Scientists are pursuing materials that can conduct electricity with perfect efficiency under ambient conditions. In this episode, the physicist Siddharth Shanker Saxena tells co-host Janna Levin about what makes this hunt so difficult and consequential.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes.

Perhaps dark matter is made of an entirely different kind of particle than the ones physicists have been searching for. New experiments are springing up to look for these ultra-lightweight phantoms.

In 1940 André Weil wrote a letter to his sister, Simone, outlining his vision for translating between three distinct areas of mathematics. Eighty years later, it still animates many of the most exciting developments in the field.

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size.