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Their result shows the importance of not taking anything for granted, said Noga Alon, a mathematician at Princeton. “We have to be suspicious, even about things that intuitively look very likely to be true.” Gladkov, Pak, and Zimin found many small-graph examples that satisfied the conjecture, but in the end, those did not reflect the […]
“It’s a great algorithm,” said Erik Demaine, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s very fast, simple, and easy to implement.” To put this procedure into practice, you’d need to decide on a system for organizing your notes—a data structure, in the lingo of computer science. That may sound like a minor […]
In the world of quantum physics, another record appears to have just been broken. In a paper listed on the preprint site ArXiv, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China claim to have observed atoms in a state of quantum superposition for 23 minutes. Being able to keep quantum states stable for […]
“It provides a natural framework, or a bookkeeping mechanism, to assemble very large numbers of Feynman diagrams,” said Marcus Spradlin, a physicist at Brown University who has been picking up the new tools of surfaceology. “There’s an exponential compactification in information.” Carolina Figueiredo, a graduate student at Princeton University, noticed a striking coincidence where three […]
When England’s team exposed caterpillars to electric fields similar to those generated by a flying wasp, caterpillars displayed defensive behaviors such as coiling, flailing, or biting. “This basically insinuates,” England said, that “prey and predator can detect each other just using static electricity.” Dornhaus, the behavioral ecologist, questioned whether electroreception buys the caterpillar much time. […]