Chemist Lee Cronin challenges AI doom and explains assembly theory, showing how complexity signals life, so you can judge ...

Multimodal large language models have shown powerful abilities to understand and reason across text and images, but their ...

There have been a number of high-profile cases where scientific papers have had to be retracted because they were filled with AI-generated slop—the most recent coming just two weeks ago. These ...

On October 8, 2024, the field of physics was plunged into controversy. That day, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for discoveries not involving black holes, cosmology, or strange new subatomic ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in general, research mathematicians don’t need to think about it ...

"We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity," says Dr. Faizal. "Therefore, no physically complete and ...

From powering search engines to securing data and optimizing networks, algorithms underpin nearly every aspect of modern technology. Understanding how efficiently they can solve problems — and where ...

Many authors have written about the harm of oversimplification, pointing out that it distorts reality, leads to shallow understanding, impairs problem-solving, and fuels biases. In culture wars, it ...

In 1977, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) imposed a ban on women of childbearing age being included in early drug trials – even if they used contraception or had vasectomised partners. This ...