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Some modern image generators rely on the principles of diffusion to create images. Alternatives based on the process behind the distribution of charged particles may yield even better results. The post The Physical Process That Powers a New Type of Generative AI first appeared on Quanta Magazine
a year ago

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Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies

An attack on a fundamental proof technique reveals a glaring security issue for blockchains and other digital encryption schemes. The post Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies first appeared on Quanta Magazine

14 hours ago 2 votes
New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source

After just a few months of work, a complete newcomer to the world of sphere packing has solved one of its biggest open problems. The post New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source first appeared on Quanta Magazine

3 days ago 8 votes
How Smell Guides Our Inner World

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that enter your nose and the individual neurons that translate them into perception in your brain. The post How Smell Guides Our Inner World first appeared on Quanta Magazine

a week ago 8 votes
Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan. The post Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms first appeared on Quanta Magazine

a week ago 10 votes
Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an inevitable by-product of their architecture. The post Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity first appeared on Quanta Magazine

a week ago 12 votes

More in science

What's new in biology, summer 2025 edition

The first gonorrhea vaccination program, contact lenses that see infrared light, the protein behind sweet tastes, a baby cured with gene therapy, and more

15 hours ago 2 votes
Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies

An attack on a fundamental proof technique reveals a glaring security issue for blockchains and other digital encryption schemes. The post Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies first appeared on Quanta Magazine

14 hours ago 2 votes
Koalas Spend Just 10 Minutes a Day on the Ground — That's Usually When They're Killed

Koalas, which spend most of their lives high up in eucalyptus trees, usually die while on the ground, often mauled by dogs or hit by cars. More striking, a new study reveals that the amount of time they spend on the ground is only around 10 minutes a day. Read more on E360 →

yesterday 2 votes
New updates + tetrahedra, tunneling times, and more

Here are a number of items from the past week or so that I think readers of this blog might find interesting: Essentially all the news pertaining to the US federal funding of science continues to be awful.  This article from Science summarizes the situation well, as does this from The Guardian and this editorial in the Washington Post. I do like the idea of a science fair of cancelled grants as a way to try to get alleged bipartisan appropriator notice of just how bad the consequences would be of the proposed cuts.   On a more uplifting note, mathematicians have empirically demonstrated a conjecture originally made by John Conway, that it is possible to make a tetrahedral pyramid that, under gravity, has only one stable orientation.  Quanta has a nice piece on this with a cool animated gif, and here is the actual preprint about it.  It's all about mass distributions and moments of inertia about edges.  As others have pointed out including the authors, this could be quite useful for situations like recent lunar lander attempts that seem to have a difficult time not topping over. A paper last week in Nature uses photons and a microcavity to try to test how long it takes photons to tunnel through a classically forbidden region.  In this setup, it is mathematically legit to model the photons as if they have an effective mass, and one can model the barrier they need to traverse in terms of an effective potential energy.  Classically, if the kinetic energy of the particle of interest is less than the potential energy of the barrier, the particle is forbidden inside the barrier.  I've posted about the issue of tunneling time repeatedly over the years (see here for a 2020 post containing links), because I think it's a fascinating problem both conceptually and as a puzzle for experimentalists (how does one truly do a fair test of this?).  The take-away from this paper is, the more classically forbidden the motion, the faster the deduced tunneling time.  This has been seen in other experiments testing this idea.  A key element of novelty in the new paper is the claim that the present experiment seems (according to the authors) to not be reasonably modeled by Bohmian mechanics.  I'd need to read this in more depth to better understand it, as I had thought that Bohmian mechanics applied to problems like this is generally indistinguishable in predictions from conventional quantum mechanics, basically by design. In other non-condensed matter news, there is an interstellar comet transiting the solar system right now.  This is very cool - it's only the third such object detected by humans, but to be fair we've only really been looking for a few years.  This suggests that moderately sized hunks of material are likely passing through from interstellar space all the time, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will detect a boatload of them.  My inner science fiction fan is hoping that the object changes its orbit at perihelion by mysterious means.   This week is crunch time for a final push on US congressional appropriators to try to influence science agency budgets in FY26.  I urge you to reach out if this matters to you.  Likewise, I think it's more than reasonable to ask congress why the NSF is getting kicked out of its headquarters with no plan for an alternative agency location, so that the HUD secretary can have a palatial second home in that building.

yesterday 4 votes
In Uganda, Deadly Landslides Force an Agricultural Reckoning

As growing populations denude its slopes and heavy rain intensifies, Mount Elgon has become increasingly vulnerable to landslides. In response, Ugandan farmers are planting native trees and changing the crops they plant in efforts to build resilience against future disasters. Read more on E360 →

2 days ago 2 votes