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The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI
By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.
The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA
By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.
The Physicist Decoding the Nonbinary Nature of the Subatomic World
Inside the proton, quarks and gluons shift and morph their properties in ways that physicists are still struggling to understand. Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli brings to the problem a perspective unlike many of their peers.
Mathematical Thinking Isn’t What You Think It Is
The mathematician David Bessis claims that everyone is capable of, and can benefit greatly from, mathematical thinking.
He’s Gleaning the Design Rules of Life to Re-Create It
Yizhi “Patrick” Cai is coordinating a global effort to write a complete synthetic yeast genome. If he succeeds, the resulting cell will be the artificial life most closely related to humans to date.
The Computer Scientist Who Builds Big Pictures From Small Details
To better understand machine learning algorithms, Lenka Zdeborová treats them like physical materials.
Can Space-Time Be Saved?
Curious connections between physics and math suggest to Latham Boyle that space-time may survive the jump to the next theory of reality.
The Logic That Must Lie Behind a New Physics
The philosopher Karen Crowther digs into how the space-time fabric could possibly emerge from something non-spatiotemporal.
Perplexing the Web, One Probability Puzzle at a Time
The mathematician Daniel Litt has driven social media users to distraction with a series of simple-seeming but counterintuitive probability puzzles.