Q&A – Quanta Magazine

Perplexing the Web, One Probability Puzzle at a Time

Erica Klarreich — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:00:56 +0000

In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent probability puzzle on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) — and set a corner of the Twitterverse on fire. Imagine, he wrote, that you have an urn filled with 100 balls, some red and some green. You can’t see inside; all you know is that someone determined the number of red balls by picking a number between zero and 100 from a hat.

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With ‘Digital Twins,’ The Doctor Will See You Now

Max G. Levy — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 14:02:12 +0000

Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and see what your coronary arteries or red blood cells might do in a week. Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models...

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He Seeks Mystery Magnetic Fields With His Quantum Compass

Charlie Wood — Fri, 17 May 2024 14:03:34 +0000

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 a 50-year-old tool for new purposes.

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Does AI Know What an Apple Is? She Aims to Find Out.

John Pavlus — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:10:35 +0000

Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding within large language models (LLMs) — and she might sound as if she’s poking fun at it. The phrase “hand-wavy” is a favorite, and if she mentions “meaning” or “reasoning,” it’ll often come with conspicuous air quotes. This is just Pavlick’s way of keeping herself honest. As a computer scientist studying language...

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Pleasure or Pain? He Maps the Neural Circuits That Decide.

Ingrid Wickelgren — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 13:50:36 +0000

Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has been fascinated by the variety of the natural world since he was a boy growing up in Philadelphia. The nature walks he took under the tutelage of his third grade teacher, Mr. Moore, entranced him. “We got to interact and engage with wildlife and see animals in their native environment,” he recalled. Abdus-Saboor also brought a menagerie of creatures — cats, dogs, lizards...

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