Quirky backyard sprinklers helped scientists solve a decades-old mystery about how flowing water makes objects spin. Every summer, lawns across the country come alive with “silly sprinklers,” colorful devices with looping and spiraling tubes that send water spraying in unexpected patterns. Although they may look like simple backyard toys, mathematicians have now used their unusual [...]

The young mathematician won a prestigious Fields Medal for her work on the so-called Kakeya conjecture.

A reverse prediction test suggests that supposedly brainlike AI models may rely on visual strategies the primate brain does not use. Artificial intelligence can sometimes predict how the brain responds when people recognize objects. But that resemblance may hide an important weakness: the internal workings of today’s vision models do not necessarily match the processes [...]

A distant quasar has revealed one of the most extreme ultraviolet outflows ever observed, providing new clues about the powerful interactions between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. A supermassive black hole more than a billion times the mass of the Sun is blasting gas through space at such extraordinary speeds that astronomers are [...]