In his landmark 1949 paper, Claude Shannon showed how simple statistical models called Markov chains could reproduce the structure of human language. By modeling how letters and words depend on one ...

How would we recognize a message from an alien civilization if we cannot understand its language? By combining information theory, Zipf’s Law, and studies of human and dolphin communication, ...

Vietnamese, for example, was one of the lowest-ranked languages for speed, but each syllable encoded a lot of information. Vietnamese speakers needed to utter fewer syllables to get their point across ...

The conceptual architecture of black holes has undergone a radical transformation between 2024 and 2026, transitioning from the classical bottomless pits of general relativity to the intricate ...

The natural and the social world shaped the evolution of each. Knowing whom to invite to dinner is as important as knowing ...

Many people who don’t believe one conspiracy theory about that station—known as the High-frequency Active Auroral Research ...

Information theory and computation is the study and development of protocols and algorithms for solving problems and analysing information. This discipline usually breaks information down into ...

This is Colossus: a data center that Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, xAI, is using as a training ground for Grok, one ...

Surprise parties. Marriage proposals. Sports upsets. Bank collapses. Military sneak attacks. Why do some unexpected events ...

Balancing nitrogen use is critical for maximizing crop yield while minimizing environmental and economic costs. A new approach integrates drone-based ...

The team's automated reasoning research aims to build algorithms that allow computers to perform logical reasoning. The output of these algorithms is traditionally binary: satisfiable or unsatisfiable ...

Theoretical physics is the development of mathematical formalisms and computational protocols for describing all aspects of objects found in the world around us and their interaction. This can involve ...