In the world of quantum error correction, an underdog is coming for the king. Last week, new simulations from two groups reported that a rising class of quantum error-correcting codes is more efficient by an order of magnitude than the …
Our planet is doomed. In a few billion years, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and swell into a red giant — a star so big it will scorch, blacken and swallow up the inner planets. While red giants …
The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing has awarded seed grants to seven projects that are exploring how artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction can be leveraged to enhance modern work spaces to achieve better management and higher productivity.
Funded …
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 …
Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if — preferably, when — JWST started making observations, she …
For decades, astronomers have been perplexed by planetary magnetic fields. In our own solar system, there is no rule that explains which worlds generate these magnetic sheaths: Earth, for example, has one, but its sister world — Venus — does …
In August 2013, dozens of renowned theoretical physicists gathered in Santa Barbara, California, to discuss a crisis. Their tenuous understanding of black holes was falling apart. Viewed from afar, as if through a telescope, a black hole should behave like …
Aristotle argued almost 2,400 years ago that a perfect vacuum could never exist. Today, the concept of nothingness figures at least implicitly into almost every theory of modern physics. In this episode closing out season 2 of “The Joy of …
Researchers from MIT and Stanford University have devised a new machine-learning approach that could be used to control a robot, such as a drone or autonomous vehicle, more effectively and efficiently in dynamic environments where conditions can change rapidly.
This …
Like a bright city in the middle of a barren desert, our galactic neighborhood is enveloped by a cosmic void — an enormous, almost unfathomably empty pocket of space. Recently, sky surveys have spotted thousands more of these vacant bubbles. …
Imagine you visit a maze with some friends. You emerge from the exit shortly after going in, and wait around for hours before your friends emerge. Naturally, they ask about the path you took — surely you can retrace your …
While much of our planet’s air and seas are stirred at a tempest’s whim, some features are far more regular. At the equator, thousand-kilometer-long waves persist amid the chaos. In both the ocean and the atmosphere, these gargantuan waves, called …
Most physicists expect that when we zoom in on the fabric of reality, the unintuitive weirdness of quantum mechanics persists down to the very smallest scales. But in those settings, quantum mechanics collides with classical gravity in a resolutely incompatible …
Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles — those moving much faster than the rest — traveled here from powerful sources farther …
Astronomers have found an extra-low hum rumbling through the universe. The discovery, announced today, shows that extra-large ripples in space-time are constantly squashing and changing the shape of space. These gravitational waves are cousins to the echoes from black hole …
The jellyfish that move through the seas by gently pulsing their saclike bodies may not seem to hold many secrets that would interest human engineers. But simple as the creatures are, jellyfish are masterful at harnessing and controlling the flow …
On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2021, Silvio Decurtins was leafing through a paper with a title that could have been pulled from a comic book for mathematically inclined teens: “Plato’s Cube and the Natural Geometry of Fragmentation.” …
Sailors have spun yarns for centuries about gigantic rogue waves that could suddenly come out of nowhere to capsize the ships of unwary mariners. Scientists didn’t believe them because the stories seemed at odds with everything else known about waves. …
A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the simplest nuclear systems. To test the strong nuclear …
Three Spanish MIT postdocs, Luis Antonio Benítez, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, and Fernando Romero López, were chosen by the Department of Physics as the first cohort of Mauricio and Carlota Botton Foundation Fellows.
This year’s recipients are provided with a one-year stipend …