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.

Children as young as 4 years old are capable of finding efficient solutions to complex problems, such as independently inventing sorting algorithms developed by computer scientists. The scientists ...

Rising use “is not a signal of satisfaction,” an author of a new report says. Rather, heavy users of the apps are under “financial strain.” By Ann Carrns Pay-advance apps are marketed as a way to help ...

Switching clocks twice a year disrupts circadian rhythms in ways that harm health. Stanford scientists found permanent standard time would reduce obesity and stroke rates nationwide, making it the ...

Many college students are unable to graduate on time because required courses are not offered when they need them. Mounting budget cuts and campus layoffs could make the problem worse. As colleges ...

There is a new sorting algorithm a deterministic O(m log2/3 n)-time algorithm for single-source shortest paths (SSSP) on directed graphs with real non-negative edge weights in the comparison-addition ...

See the world through the lens of science. Sign up for our free, daily newsletter Today in Science. As a child of the 1990s, I couldn’t avoid the game-turned-best-seller Tetris. Launched in 1984 by ...

For centuries, we have relied on human intuition, behavioral cues, and painstaking manual analysis to determine veracity in written communications. Enter artificial intelligence. AI algorithms, ...

Astronomers use brokers to identify which signals to pursue in an endless stream of alerts. Looking up at the stars at night, it may not be obvious that the universe is constantly changing. But it is: ...

If there is one thing New Yorkers can agree on, it’s that “the rent is too damn high.” There are, of course, a number of factors contributing to skyrocketing rents in New York City: a lack of ...

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

The gap between what Americans earn and how much they need to bring in to achieve a basic standard of living is growing, according to a new report. The analysis, from the Ludwig Institute for Shared ...