Abstractions blog

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.

Researchers say there are three possible explanations for the anomalous data. One is mundane. Two would revolutionize physics.

We asked four physicists why gravity stands out among the forces of nature. We got four different answers.

Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics.

To explain why men are on average taller than women, scientists theorized about competition for mates. But the effects of estrogen on bone growth may be answer enough.

Neural networks have been taught to quickly read the surfaces of proteins — molecules critical to many biological processes.

To distinguish between fundamentally different objects, mathematicians turn to invariants that encode the objects’ essential features.

Mathematicians try to figure out when problems can be solved using current knowledge — and when they have to chart a new path instead.

Collider physicists report that several measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their collective drift is more suggestive.