The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even ...

The effects of insufficient water are felt by every cell in the body, but it’s the brain that manifests our experience of ...

Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size ...

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks.

It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long. Yet a paper posted on ...

Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is ...

Results from neural networks support the idea that brains are “prediction machines” — and that they work that way to conserve energy.

An Infinity of Infinities Yes, infinity comes in many sizes. In 1873, the German mathematician Georg Cantor shook math to the core when he discovered that the “real” numbers that fill the number line ...

A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century.

A new proof has debunked a conspiracy that mathematicians feared might haunt the number line. In doing so, it has given them another set of tools for understanding arithmetic’s fundamental building ...