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Which is heavier: a pound of feathers or a pound of gold? what 87 AI models think
We asked 87 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. The answer was Feathers; 35 got it right. See every answer and who dissented.
11 min · 2,629 words
A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis
Dermatologist Dr Magnus Lynch tested GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 on biopsy-proven skin lesions from the MILK10k dataset and found both frontier LLMs missed melanomas that a fine-tuned 2015-era Inception v3 CNN caught, publishing the cases, prompts, replies and scoring code so others can rerun it.
6 min · 1,449 words
AI Article Reviews Dominate Human Peer Reviews at Their Best: Evidence and Policy Choices
Harvard IQSS working paper by Gary King and Steven Worthington comparing AI-generated reviews with high-quality, paid human reviews of papers submitted to the rapidPeer service; AI reviews won on every criterion measured in blind judgments, with no fabricated sources and about a third the rate of incorrect claims. The paper discusses implications for journal policy.
1 min · 278 words
Do we really need bigger AI weather forecasting models to improve resolution?
Emma Scharfmann shows that instead of building a bigger AI weather model you can train a small downscaler on top of an existing global one: trained in about an hour, it sharpens AIFS-ENS temperature forecasts over France from ~28 km to 5.5 km and cuts station-measured error by 14% RMSE and 21% CRPS over the first two days.
17 min · 3,914 words
Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, mathematician Francesco Maggi weighs whether LLM-based research systems will bring a golden or dark age for mathematics and science, and calls for standards for LLM-generated scholarship, study of effects on education and training, and publicly governed LLM infrastructure, while urging mathematicians to keep mathematics a living part of human culture.
15 min · 3,378 words
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, mathematician Shaoming Guo says he and colleagues are preparing a new open-access math journal that prioritises understanding over priority, and invites the community to discuss what journals should reward, how papers are evaluated, and how new tools could reshape mathematical publishing.
1 min · 325 words
Making Chicken Transparent Using Dorito DustModifying the optical properties of biological tissues with tartrazine
CasualPhysicsEnjoyer walks through a Nature paper on making live tissue optically transparent with absorbing molecules such as tartrazine (the yellow dye in Doritos), then recreates and explains the physics at home: refractive-index matching, complex permittivity, and why a yellow dye can open a window into chicken meat.
15 min · 3,512 words
Designing more efficient quantum circuits with Claude
Anthropic describes giving Claude plain-language specifications for eight quantum circuits from chemistry, optimization, physics simulation and number theory, plus an automated evaluator. Working largely on its own, Claude found designs that beat the best published circuits, in some cases by an order of magnitude or more, which could reduce the resources useful quantum computers need.
17 min · 3,860 words
Dam Removals Are Bringing Fish Back Across the Northeastern United StatesStriking down one tiny barrier at a time
Ben Goldfarb for Smithsonian Magazine on how removing small, obsolete dams across the Northeast is letting herring and other fish return—even when the West’s big dam demolitions get the headlines.
18 min · 4,037 words
How many stars does it take to find a cluster?A pre-registered search for co-moving stars in Gaia DR3, and an honest measure of what it can and cannot see.
Shaurya describes a pre-registered search for groups of co-moving stars within about 500 parsecs of the Sun using Gaia DR3. The pipeline recovers known clusters and its sensitivity is measured by injection tests (roughly 10 surviving members beyond 140 pc), but it produces too many false positives to trust a new detection, and a classifier did not fully fix that.
6 min · 1,475 words
Bringing the magic: Google breaks open a bottleneck in quantum computing
Google Quantum AI reports in Science that magic state cultivation works in practice on its Willow processor, cutting errors about 40x versus no cultivation. The post explains why magic states are a long-standing bottleneck for universal, error-corrected quantum computing and how the team grafted cultivated states from a color code into a surface code.
3 min · 735 words
I Know Why the Mathematicians WeepOn technological grief
Derek Thompson talks with Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz about why OpenAI's flood of AI-generated proofs has left mathematicians grieving, arguing that science is both a craft and a conversation between minds, and that machines producing knowledge without human understanding threaten the social half of science that people will need to protect.
8 min · 1,932 words
Henrik Karlsson reflects on why music moves us so deeply, from a Sámi joik heard on the car radio to how a soundtrack can turn a horror scene funny, and what that says about meaning, emotion and the narrow range of commercial music.
14 min · 3,117 words
CERN and Mistral join forces to accelerate AI for science
CERN and Mistral AI have signed a statement of intent for a long-term partnership on foundation models for science, starting with a pretrained Large Physics Model for collider physics trained on billions of simulated LHC proton-proton collisions to support tasks from particle reconstruction to analysis.
2 min · 553 words
“Men with Queer Nerves”: The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine
Ross Bullen writes for The Public Domain Review about the French-Canadian lumberjacks around Maine's Moosehead Lake who, at the slightest stimulus, would jump, strike out or mimic languages they could not speak, and about neurologist George M. Beard, who first wrote about them in an 1878 essay and linked their behavior to religious frenzy and neurasthenia.
16 min · 3,760 words
Things to know if you get cancer (2026 Edition)
After being diagnosed with oral squamous cell carcinoma in May 2026, JJ Maxwell shares practical lessons for patients: push hard on scheduling, don't trust AI reassurance, insist on genetic testing, read the NCCN standard-of-care guidelines, get a fast second opinion at a top cancer center, and keep AI-summarized appointment notes.
3 min · 669 words
E. coli chemotaxis: the baffling intelligence of a single cell
James Somers tells the story of how a single E. coli cell forages for nutrients through chemotaxis: its run-and-tumble swimming, the receptor and signaling proteins that give it something like smell, drive and memory, adaptation through methylation, and why this one phenomenon is a good way into understanding biology as a whole.
28 min · 6,437 words
The quiet math revolution (and where do we go from here)
Marcus Johansson reacts to OpenAI’s dump of 722 model-written math manuscripts, asking what machine-checked proofs mean for mathematical practice, who still understands the results, and where Terence Tao’s “Math 2.0” idea leaves human mathematicians.
10 min · 2,396 words
Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence?
Quanta columnist Natalie Wolchover traces the attention mechanism from Dzmitry Bahdanau's 2014 internship work on machine translation in Montreal through transformers to today's AI boom, and asks why attention turned out to be the key mathematical idea, drawing on researchers' views about what it captures and whether brains do something similar more efficiently.
10 min · 2,402 words
Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
The History Blog reports a large Hittite-period cuneiform archive excavated in Turkey, describing the tablets’ find context, what kinds of administrative and royal records they appear to contain, and why the discovery matters for Anatolian Bronze Age history.
2 min · 549 words