Biologists have often wondered what would happen if they could rewind the tape of life’s history and let evolution play out all over again. Would lineages of organisms evolve in radically different ways if given that opportunity? Or would they tend to evolve the same kinds of eyes, wings and other adaptive traits because their previous evolutionary histories had already sent them down certain...
Time seems linear to us: We remember the past, experience the present and predict the future, moving consecutively from one moment to the next. But why is it that way, and could time ultimately be a kind of illusion? In this episode, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek speaks with host Steven Strogatz about the many “arrows” of time and why most of them seem irreversible...
A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach won’t displace the huge models that undergird the biggest apps, it could reveal more about how these programs understand language. The new research marks “a significant advance in the field,” said Jea Kwon...
Repetition doesn’t always have to be humdrum. In mathematics, it is a powerful force, capable of generating bewildering complexity. Even after decades of study, mathematicians find themselves unable to answer questions about the repeated execution of very simple rules — the most basic “dynamical systems.” But in trying to do so, they have uncovered deep connections between those rules and other...
It is a truth of both physics and everyday experience that things fall apart. Ice melts. Buildings crumble. Any object, if you wait long enough, gets mixed up with itself and its surroundings beyond recognition. But beginning in 2005, a series of breakthroughs made this death march seem optional. In just the right quantum setting, any arrangement of electrons or atoms would stay put for all...
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