Don’t make this a comedy of errors UPDATE: Read the answers here Today’s puzzles come from the quill of Rob Eastaway, the bard of brainteasers, whose latest book Much Ado About Numbers is a journey into Shakespeare’s mathematical life...
A new technique can more effectively perform a safety check on an AI chatbot. Researchers enabled their model to prompt a chatbot to generate toxic responses, which are used to prevent the chatbot from giving hateful or harmful answers...
Theoretical physicist whose name was attached to the Higgs boson, a sign of the mechanism underlying the structure of atoms In 1964 the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who has died aged 94, suggested that the universe contains an...
Researchers have developed a new method to predict the financial impacts climate change will have on agriculture, which can help support food security and financial stability for countries increasingly prone to climate catastrophes.
The Takagi--Sugeno (T--S) fuzzy descriptor system offers a promising avenue for controlling non-linear systems but lacks optimal control strategies. Moreover, while robust control methods have been developed, they add additional...
Scientists have developed an automated workflow that could accelerate the discovery of new pharmaceutical drugs and other useful products. The new automated approach could analyze chemical reactions in real time and identify new...
Researchers developed a foundational language model to decode mRNA sequences and optimize those sequences for vaccine development. The tool shows broader promise as a means for studying molecular biology.
The development of AI models is an overlooked climate culprit. Computer scientists have created a recipe book for designing AI models that use much less energy without compromising performance. They argue that a model's energy...
Both arithmetic aficionados and the mathematically challenged will be equally captivated by new research that upends hundreds of years of popular belief about prime numbers.
Little progress had been made in solving Ramsey problems since the 1930s. Now, researchers have found the answer to r(4,t), a longstanding Ramsey problem that has perplexed the math world for decades.
Imagine if you enrolled your child in swimming lessons but instead of a qualified swimming instructor, they were taught freestyle technique by a soccer coach.
Europe’s weights system is baffling for American cooks used to volumes and cups, but will metric’s accuracy eventually tip the scales? Like most Americans, Samin Nosrat grew up in a home with cup measures in the kitchen. That said, they...
Researchers have developed physics-based guidelines that will benefit host-guest intercalated materials research. By using only two guest properties and eight host-derived descriptors, they correctly predicted the intercalation energies...
Sci-fi author and computer scientist who coined the term ‘the Singularity’ to describe the rapid acceleration of AI One day in 1979, while logged in to San Diego State University’s principal computer from his home, Vernor Vinge found...
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) might be best known from text or image-creating applications like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion. But its usefulness beyond that is being shown in more and more different scientific fields.
This Easter season, as you tear open those chocolate eggs, have you ever wondered why they're snugly wrapped in foil? Turns out the answer lies within the easter egg equation.
AI is revolutionizing the way researchers seek to identify new materials, but it still has some shortcomings. Now, a team of researchers has navigated AI's pitfalls to identify a thermoelectric material that boasts remarkable properties.
Researchers have recently published FreeDTS -- a shared software package designed to model and study biological membranes at the mesoscale -- the scale 'in between' the larger macro level and smaller micro level. This software fills an...
Chinese ice-ray lattice, or "binglie" as it is called in Chinese, is an intricate pattern that looks like cracked ice and is a common decorative element used in traditional Chinese window designs.
For Michel Talagrand, who won the Abel mathematics prize on Wednesday, math provided a fun life free from all constraints—and an escape from the eye problems he suffered as a child.
The traveling salesman problem is considered a prime example of a combinatorial optimization problem. Now a team has shown that a certain class of such problems can actually be solved better and much faster with quantum computers than...
Researchers have developed a new training tool to help artificial intelligence (AI) programs better account for the fact that humans don't always tell the truth when providing personal information. The new tool was developed for use in...
Math enthusiasts around the world, from college kids to rocket scientists, celebrate Pi Day on Thursday, which is March 14 or 3/14—the first three digits of an infinite number with many practical uses.
The origin of heavy elements in our universe is theorized to be the result of neutron star collisions, which produce conditions hot and dense enough for free neutrons to merge with atomic nuclei and form new elements in a split-second...
Existing ship control systems using Model Predictive Control for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) do not consider the various forces acting on ships in real sea conditions. Addressing this gap, researchers developed a novel...
Through steady advances in the development of quantum computers and their ever-improving performance, it will be possible in the future to crack our current encryption processes. To address this challenge, researchers are developing...
Tiny particles like pollen grains move constantly, pushed and pulled by environmental forces. To study this motion, physicists use a "random walk" model—a system in which every step is determined by a random process. Random walks are...
Neural networks have been powering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, including the large language models that are now being used in a wide range of applications, from finance, to human resources to health care. But these networks...
Neural networks have been powering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, including the large language models that are now being used in a wide range of applications, from finance, to human resources to healthcare. But these networks...
March 14 marks the annual celebration of the mathematical constant pi, aka the Greek letter π. Its infinite number of digits is usually rounded to 3.14, hence the date of Pi Day. For some people, the occasion marks an annual excuse to...
When you teach a child how to solve puzzles, you can either let them figure it out through trial and error, or you can guide them with some basic rules and tips. Similarly, incorporating rules and tips into AI training -- such as the...
A new safety-check technique can prove with 100 percent accuracy that a planned robot motion will not result in a collision. The method can generate a proof in seconds and does so in a way that can be easily verified by a human.
A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with CY Cergy Paris University (CYU) and University of Burgundy (uB), have analyzed drawings made by children and adults when solving simple problems. The scientists found...
Solving arithmetic problems, even simple subtractions, involves mental representations whose influence remains to be clarified. Visualizing these representations would enable us to better understand our reasoning and adapt our teaching...
A new mathematical model has shown, with great precision, the impact that physiological and psychological parameters have on running performance and provides tips for optimized training.
Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence model that can accurately identify tumors and diseases in medical images. The tool draws a map to explain each diagnosis, helping doctors follow its line of reasoning, check for...
Quantum sensor technology promises even more precise measurements of physical quantities. A team has now compared the signals of up to 91 quantum sensors with each other and thus successfully eliminated the noise caused by interactions...
The answer to today’s puzzles Earlier today I set you three examples of a word puzzle that illuminates one of the smash hits of theoretical computer science. (To read about this result, the PCP theorem , please check out the original...
A crossword puzzle with a twist UPDATE: You can read the solutions here Today’s puzzle illuminates one of the smash hits of theoretical computer science, a mind-boggling result that left even experts in the field gobsmacked . We’ll get...
When facing a daunting dataset, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), known as PCA, can help distill complexity by finding a few meaningful features that explain the most significant proportion of the data variance.
Is it possible to deduce the shape of a drum from the sounds it makes? This is the kind of question that Iosif Polterovich, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Université de Montréal, likes to ask. Polterovich...
With its bright colors, easy-to-learn rules and familiar music, the video game Tetris has endured as a pop culture icon over the last 40 years. Many people, like me, have been playing the game for decades, and it has evolved to adapt to...
Intelligent tutoring systems for math problems helped pupils remain or even increase their performance during the pandemic. This is the conclusion of a new study led by the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Loughborough...
The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from...
Intelligent tutoring systems for math problems helped pupils remain or even increase their performance during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study. Researchers analyzed data from five million exercises done by around 2,700...
The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from...
Human coexistence depends on cooperation. Individuals have different motivations and reasons to collaborate, resulting in social dilemmas, such as the well-known prisoner's dilemma. Scientists now present a new mathematical principle...