News

Electric School Buses Can Be Backup Batteries For the US Power Grid

Inside the Plan to Print All of Wikipedia and Send It to the Moon

Evidence of an Alien Ocean Found in Defunct 1990s Spacecraft Data

US cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data

A Chemist Shines Light on a Surprising Prime Number Pattern

About a year ago, the theoretical chemist Salvatore Torquato met with the number theorist Matthew de Courcy-Ireland to explain that he had done something highly unorthodox with prime numbers, those positive integers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Torquato told de Courcy-Ireland, a final-year graduate student at Princeton who had been recommended by another mathematician, that a year before, on a hunch, he had performed diffraction on sequences of prime numbers. Hoping to highlight the elusive order in the distribution of the primes, he and his student Ge Zhang had modeled them as a one-dimensional sequence of particles — essentially, little spheres that can scatter light.

How an AI Startup Could Defeat Now Unbeatable Bugs

The need for new medications is higher than ever, but so is the cost and time to bring them to market. Developing a new drug can cost billions and take as long as 14 years, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Yet with all that effort, only 8 percent of drugs make it to market, the FDA said.

Prefrontal cortex as a meta-reinforcement learning system

Recently, AI systems have mastered a range of video-games such as Atari classics Breakout and Pong. But as impressive as this performance is, AI still relies on the equivalent of thousands of hours of gameplay to reach and surpass the performance of human video game players. In contrast, we can usually grasp the basics of a video game we have never played before in a matter of minutes.

Think organic food is better for you, animals, and the planet? Think again

How long can a neutron survive outside an atom?

Neutrons are probably best known for being a chargeless component of the nucleus of all atoms other than hydrogen. In that context, they can be extremely stable—you probably noted the fact that your body wasn’t decaying around you. But pull neutrons out of that context, and they become very unhappy.

The spectacular power of Big Lens

If you have been wearing glasses for years, like me, it can be surprising to discover that you perceive the world thanks to a few giant companies that you have never heard of. Worrying about the fraying edge of motorway lights at night, or words that slide on the page, and occasionally spending a fortune at the opticians is, for many of us, enough to think about. And spectacles are unusual things.