Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number of them exist. Producing one on command doesn’t seem as if it should be difficult. But it is. Constructing arbitrarily large prime […]
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Last May, scientists reported that they’d successfully grown plants in moon soil for the first time. At the University of Florida’s Space Plants Lab in Gainesville, a dozen Arabidopsis thaliana plants germinated and grew, each in a few teaspoons of lunar regolith — the dusty material that covers much of the moon. “The first surprise was that
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Geometry students are taught that squaring the circle — using a compass and straightedge to draw a square with the same area as a given circle — is impossible. But in February 2022, a trio of mathematicians who couldn’t resist an impossible challenge presented the closest solution yet for the problem. Squaring the circle has
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“Six degrees of separation” refers to a long-held notion about social networks—namely, that any two people in a social network are connected to each other, through friends of friends, by a maximum of five individuals. But there’s more to this notion than folk wisdom: Researchers have found, repeatedly (for example, via studies of Twitter), that the maximum
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Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable behaviors. What movie do these emojis describe? That prompt was one of 204 tasks chosen last year to test the ability of various large language models (LLMs) — the computational engines behind AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. The simplest
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In steganography, an ordinary message masks the presence of a secret communication. Humans can never do it perfectly, but a new study shows it’s possible for machines. On June 27, 2010, the FBI arrested 10 Russian spies who lived and worked as American professionals near New York City. The case, which unraveled an intricate system
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During a 5-year span between 1970 and 1975, 29 states in the United States lowered the legal age for drinking alcohol from 21 to 18, 19, or 20. Advocates for changing the minimum age noted that a person old enough to vote or fight in a war was old enough to drink. Those against it
Can Laws be Medicines? Read More »
If you want to study the stars, there’s no better place to start than close to home. After all, the nearest star is just 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away: the Sun. Its daily presence and predictable motions through the sky may make it seem like a boring, steady companion. But up close, it’s an
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Five years ago, computer scientist Alan Fern and his colleagues at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, set out to answer one of the most pressing questions in artificial intelligence (AI): Could they understand how AI reasons, makes decisions, and chooses its actions? The proving ground for their exploration was five classic arcade games, circa 1980,
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Kelly Kashmer credits genetic testing with saving her life. In 2014, during a routine medical appointment, a physician’s assistant began asking questions about her relatives and their experiences with cancer. As she mentally climbed her family tree, she recalled her grandmother on her mother’s side, and an aunt, had both been diagnosed with cancer. The
Should We Be Testing Everyone’s DNA? Read More »
