In a sealed lab, a string of code has become something stranger and more unsettling than software. Using artificial intelligence, researchers have written the genetic instructions for a virus that has ...

Like many people who live in a house, mine is filled with far too many storage bins of various shapes and sizes. The ...

If you’ve ever sat in the dark at 3 AM, clutching a mouse and staring at a pixels-wide gap in a smoke on Overpass, you know ...

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel Viterbi-Like successive cancellation (VL-SC) decoding algorithm for polar codes. The algorithm employs the bit log-likelihood-ratio as the “penalty value” within ...

On February 2nd, 2025, computer scientist and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy made a flippant tweet that launched a new phrase into the internet’s collective consciousness. He posted that he’d ...

The socially challenged of Reddit are currently benefiting from shared psychological hacks that help them deal with other people. A recent Ask Reddit post challenged users to give away their most ...

Python has become one of the most popular programming languages out there, particularly for beginners and those new to the hacker/maker world. Unfortunately, while it’s easy to get something up and ...

Harness the energy of the cosmos! Learn how UC Davis engineers are using a modified Stirling engine and radiative cooling to generate passive, low-power electricity from the clear night sky.

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.

A new study is the first to show that an insect can differentiate between different durations of visual cues. In Morse code, a short duration flash or “dot” denotes a letter “E” and a long duration ...

In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists found that bumblebees can tell the difference between short and long light flashes, much like recognizing Morse code. The insects learned which signal led to a ...