The modern notion of a black hole has been with us since February 1916, three months after Albert Einstein unveiled his theory of gravity. That’s when the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, in the midst of fighting in the German army during …
Suppose you have a thousand-page book, but each page has only a single line of text. You’re supposed to extract the information contained in the book using a scanner, only this particular scanner systematically goes through each and every page, …
As a boy growing up in Rochester, England, Chris German knew of his family’s strong maritime tradition, and he had no intention of continuing it. One of his grandfathers had served in the Royal Navy for much of his life, …
How do brains learn? It’s a mystery, one that applies both to the spongy organs in our skulls and to their digital counterparts in our machines. Even though artificial neural networks (ANNs) are built from elaborate webs of artificial neurons, …
Artificial intelligence researchers have celebrated a string of successes with neural networks, computer programs that roughly mimic how our brains are organized. But despite rapid progress, neural networks remain relatively inflexible, with little ability to change on the fly or …
The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds for black holes — or, …