The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

School of Physics and Optoelectronics, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, Hunan, China Accurate reconstruction of optical fiber curves has important applications in fields like medicine, aerospace, and ...

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images are already a common staple of battery research. Now, they can be paired with a simple algorithm to enable better prediction of lithium metal battery ...

Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, has been studying college financial aid and students’ higher ed spending habits for more than a decade. When his children first started ...

For centuries, we have relied on human intuition, behavioral cues, and painstaking manual analysis to determine veracity in written communications. Enter artificial intelligence. AI algorithms, ...

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

Performing complex algorithms on quantum computers will eventually require access to tens of thousands of hardware qubits. For most of the technologies being developed, this creates a problem: It’s ...