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Will Transformers Take Over Artificial Intelligence?
A simple algorithm that revolutionizes how neural networks approach language is now taking on image classification as well. It may not stop there.
Math’s ‘Oldest Problem Ever’ Gets a New Answer
A new proof significantly strengthens a decades-old result about the ubiquity of ways to represent whole numbers as sums of unit fractions.
Peptides on Stardust May Have Provided a Shortcut to Life
The discovery that short peptides can form spontaneously on cosmic dust hints at more of a role for them in the earliest stages of life’s origin, on Earth or elsewhere.
In New Math Proofs, Artificial Intelligence Plays to Win
A new computer program fashioned after artificial intelligence systems like AlphaGo has solved several open problems in combinatorics and graph theory.
Scientists Watch a Memory Form in a Living Brain
While watching a fearful memory take shape in the brain of a living fish, neuroscientists see an unexpected level of rewiring occur in the synaptic connections.
How We Can Make Sense of Chaos
Dynamical systems can be chaotic and impossible to predict, but mathematicians have discovered tools to help understand them.
A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws
Physicists are reexamining a longstanding assumption: that big stuff consists of smaller stuff.
Four Years On, New Experiment Sees No Sign of ‘Cosmic Dawn’
When astronomers tried to confirm a signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, they saw nothing.
Cryptographers Achieve Perfect Secrecy With Imperfect Devices
For the first time, experiments demonstrate the possibility of sharing secrets with perfect privacy — even when the devices used to share them cannot be trusted.