Tiny particles like pollen grains move constantly, pushed and pulled by environmental forces. To study this motion, physicists use a "random walk" model—a system in which every step is determined by a random process. Random walks are useful for studying everything from tiny physics to diffusion to...

Neural networks have been powering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, including the large language models that are now being used in a wide range of applications, from finance, to human resources to health care. But these networks remain a black box whose inner workings engineers and...

A recent study conducted at Tel Aviv University has devised a large mechanical system that operates under dynamical rules akin to those found in quantum systems. The dynamics of quantum systems, composed of microscopic particles like atoms or electrons, are notoriously difficult, if not impossible,...

Condensed matter systems and photonic technologies are regularly used by researchers to create microscale platforms that can simulate the complex dynamics of many interacting quantum particles in a more accessible setting. Some examples include ultracold atomic ensembles in optical lattices,...

The team of physicists working on the LHCb Collaboration at CERN has found that bottom quarks are more likely to exist in baryons than mesons as the density of the environment in which they exist increases. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the group describes studying the...

Is it possible to deduce the shape of a drum from the sounds it makes? This is the kind of question that Iosif Polterovich, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Université de Montréal, likes to ask. Polterovich uses spectral geometry, a branch of mathematics, to understand...

The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures....

A mathematical historian at Trinity Wester University in Canada, has found use of a decimal point by a Venetian merchant 150 years before its first known use by German mathematician Christopher Clavius. In his paper published in the journal Historia Mathematica, Glen Van Brummelen describes how he...

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." The race between innovation and obsolescence is like this....

Have you ever wondered about the best way to pack a finite number of identical spheres into a shape-shifting flexible container, like a convex hull?...