Reading a math paper is a bit like having dinner at a nice restaurant. The entrée might taste delicious, but it doesn’t tell the full story of how it was made. Clever recipes that end up tasting funky don’t make the menu; undercooked dishes are (usually) not served to customers. But missteps in both conception and execution are important parts of the...

György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies and used a radio transmitter to chat with strangers from the Faroe Islands to Jordan. He remembers some of these conversations from his “ham radio” days better than...

György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies and used a radio transmitter to chat with strangers from the Faroe Islands to Jordan. He remembers some of these conversations from his “ham radio” days better than...

Moore’s law is already pretty fast. It holds that computer chips pack in twice as many transistors every two years or so, producing major jumps in speed and efficiency. But the computing demands of the deep learning era are growing even faster than that — at a pace that is likely not sustainable. The International Energy Agency predicts that artificial...

Atomic physicists “are jacks of all trades,” according to Alex Sushkov. “You have to have the idea, design the experiment, build the experiment, run the experiment, fix everything, take data, analyze data, write up the paper. You do everything,” and that “suits my personality.” In his lab at Boston University, the Russian-born Australian is supercharging...

Imagine that you’re sent to a pristine rainforest to carry out a wildlife census. Every time you see an animal, you snap a photo. Your digital camera will track the total number of shots, but you’re only interested in the number of unique animals — all the ones that you haven’t counted already. What’s the best way to get that number? “The obvious solution...