Explainers

Long explored but infrequently embraced, base 3 computing may yet find a home in cybersecurity.

You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better to avoid them.

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.

One of the quantum fields that fills the universe is special because its default value seems poised to eventually change, changing everything.

These metaphorical gardens have become central objects in modern mathematics.

Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time.

Useful mathematical concepts, like the number line, can linger for millennia before they are rigorously defined.

Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria.

Particle physicists in search of the next theory of reality are consulting a mathematical structure that they know will never fail: a table of possibilities known as the S-matrix.