Skip to content

Normal Science

Brain healing
GraphAuthors

A reading list for frontier science

Articles across AI, biotech, forecasting, and emerging tech.

Recommendation GraphExplore who recommends whom across the networkBrowse AuthorsProfiles, influences, and key works
Weekly Digest — Free
Join researchers, founders, and analysts · Unsubscribe anytime

Categories

AllAIForecastingBioTechSecurity / OSINTMetascienceFinanceAI SafetyManufacturingEnergyCryptoStartups

Time

Sort

This Week

Things I Won't Work With: Straight Dimethyl Zinc

Bluestein·5d ago6pts

How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part III

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·2d ago

Via Wikipedia.This is my third and final essay looking at the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and how it’s likely to affect housing supply. As I’ve noted in my previous two essays, this is a sprawling piece of legislation, with 59 sections spread across 12 different “titles.” So far we’ve looked at Titles I, II, and III, which together contain 24 individual sections. In this post, I’ll look at the remaining nine titles of the package. There are a lot of sections (35!), but many of them don’t a...

Live from ICM 2026: What Is Math For in the Age of AI?

Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz·Quanta Magazine·2d ago

Mathematicians are witnessing a profound shift in their field. AI systems are now producing proofs, spotting connections between distant fields, and, in a few cases, solving problems that had stumped mathematicians for decades. The pace of progress over the past several months has raised challenging questions: What can AI systems actually do? And what happens to the more human… Source

In an Age of AI, a Physicist Seeks What Endures

Rebecca Boyle·Quanta Magazine·2d ago

In July 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy selected 278 projects to fund as part of its Genesis Mission, meant to incorporate artificial intelligence into the scientific process. One project will use AI to help physicists search for a vanishingly rare particle transformation — a muon becoming an electron — by controlling different aspects of the Mu2e experiment at Fermi National Accelerator… Source

Genome Duplication Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble

Carrie Arnold·Quanta Magazine·3d ago

No larger than the head of a match, Potamopyrgus antipodarum doesn’t look very impressive. Few people visiting New Zealand’s Lake Alexandrina even notice the tiny gastropods littering the shores. The snail’s diminutive size, however, conceals a massive secret. Sometime in the recent past, its genome doubled. Instead of having two sets of chromosomes and two copies of every gene… Source

Older

US–Indian space mission maps extreme subsidence in Mexico City

leopoldj·4mo ago202pts

Why are neural networks and cryptographic ciphers so similar? (2025)

jxmorris12·4mo ago125pts

Several neural network design principles are almost identical to cipher design principles.

Fun with polynomials and linear algebra; or, slight abstract nonsense

LolWolf·4mo ago49pts

Longest Path Search About Code Fun Fun with polynomials and linear algebra; or, slight abstract nonsense Posted 2026-04-30 This is mostly a bunch of notes to myself (with some slight expansion) and is a combination/extension/simplification of theorems/ideas/constructions from a bunch of texts, including Wistbauer’s “Foundations of Module and Ring Theory” and Fuhrmann’s “A Polynomial Approach to Linear Algebra”, along with others that at this point I don’t recall. While most of the things here ar

The gauge broke: devs felt 20% faster with AI, measured 19% slower

intrepidkarthi·2mo ago31pts

For two years I argued the feeling of AI speed had come apart from the fact of it, from watching my own teams. This summer it stopped being an anecdote. A controlled trial measured experienced developers feeling about 20% faster while running about 19% slower. The instrument we steer by reads backward.

The Mathematical Dance Inside Plant Cells

isaacfrond·4mo ago56pts

The sunlight-collecting organelles known as chloroplasts solve a packing problem: how to optimize photosynthesis without sustaining damage from dangerously intense rays.

OpenAI's claimed disproof of Connes' Rigidity Conjecture is invalid [pdf]

muglug·1mo ago22pts

Easy Random Trees

aebtebeten·4mo ago23pts

Rigorous Nonsense Home Archive Easy Random Trees Posted on February 27, 2026 by Brandon Wilson Tags: math, apl, trees Can you think of a way to efficiently generate a random plane tree? Richard P. Stanley in his book Catalan Numbers has a really nifty combinatorial proof of why Catalan numbers have the formula \[ C_n = {1 \over n+1}{2n \choose n} \] The standard proof uses generating functions applied to an inductive definition of the Catalan numbers, which frankly does little to illumiate their

The extended predicative Mahlo universe in Martin-Löf type theory (2023)

danny00·4mo ago25pts

Every shape can be cut exactly in half with one straight line

bpx51·15d ago5pts

A simple consequence of continuity, a surprising connection to topology, and the gap between knowing a solution exists and actually finding it.

Why Are Rivers So Mathematical?

bookofjoe·23d ago9pts

A simple scaling law brings order to the chaos of flowing water, rock, and sediment. New findings have extended the law even further.

Classical chess ranks 562nd of 960 starting positions after 460,800 games

lavren1974·9d ago3pts

Round 480 closed exactly half the championship. What half a million games showed — and why the classical setup came out 562nd of 960.

Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats

benbreen·2mo ago9pts

A 13th-Century Enumeration Algorithm, Ignored for 700 Years

viebel·1mo ago8pts

In Or ha-Sekhel, the Kabbalist Abraham Aboulafia prescribes a systematic way to run through every arrangement of the letters of a word. With only two or three simple rules, he describes what we would now call a recursive algorithm for generating permutations.

Deconstructing Datalog

rntz·2mo ago7pts

home datafun talon reviews résumé rss Deconstructing Datalog In September 2022, after two rounds of revisions, I submitted the final version of my PhD dissertation, Deconstructing Datalog. Datalog is a logic programming language from the ’80s that augments relational algebra with recursive queries. It has both simple semantics and efficient implementation strategies. Like Lisp and the Velvet Underground, its influence exceeds its popularity; its ideas are still being absorbed into the mainstream

The Riemann Hypothesis – interactive explanation

lifty·2mo ago5pts

An interactive journey from 'what is a prime number?' to a genuine understanding of the most important unsolved problem in mathematics.

Topological Defect Propagation to Classify Knitted Fabrics

bryanrasmussen·1mo ago4pts

Reading List 08/29/26

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·7d ago

Morning in the Tropics by Frederic Edwin Church, via WikiArt.Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at sinking London homes, US magnesium manufacturing, the World Humanoid Robot games, catastrophic flooding in Nepal, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.Housing and CitiesNew home sales are down 6.3% year over year. [Calculat...

Does Computer Science Need Computers?

Ben Brubaker·Quanta Magazine·8d ago

The pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, winner of the 1972 A.M. Turing Award and inventor of one of the most iconic algorithms in all of computing, was nothing if not opinionated. Certain programming languages drew his ire, for example: He once dubbed Fortran “the infantile disorder” and stated that “the use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a… Source

Principia Artificialis – Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Thought

badatchess·1mo ago3pts

An open research program exploring the mathematics of artificial thought: information geometry, topology, dynamical systems, and thermodynamics applied to AI inference. - holland202/Principia-Artificialis

How the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Works

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·9d ago

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is the largest crude oil storage facility in the world. It’s capable of storing 714 million barrels of oil, slightly less than 10% of the US’s annual oil consumption. Built in response to OAPEC’s 1973 oil embargo, the SPR was created to insulate the US from oil supply shocks: to make up for shortfalls and prevent steep price increases should oil imports be interrupted. In the years since its creation, it has become one of the most frequently used energy p...

A future of programmable medicine

Works in Progress·Works in Progress·10d ago

This piece is featured in Issue 25 of Works in Progress. Subscribe today to get an issue every two months delivered straight to your door.Jacob Witten explains why siRNA will change medicine as we know it.If you want a picture of biomedical research, imagine a boot stamping on a biologist’s face – for decades. The boot is labeled ‘medicinal chemistry’. This should not be taken as an insult to medicinal chemists, who heroically navigate maybe the hardest field in biomedicine.1 Rather, what I mean...

Rotating needles in space: the road to the Kakeya conjecture, and why it matters

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·10d ago

A recent tradition of the ICM is to have a non-technical popular article written for each of its medallists. (This is separate from the older tradition of having a laudatio for the winner, which is similar but aimed at a more advanced audience.) I was approached to write such an article for Hong Wang on the occasion of her Fields Medal. I have uploaded my initial version of this article, “Rotating needles in space: the road to the Kakeya conjecture, and why it matters“, to the arXiv. Chris Sogge...

Mathematical Discourse

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·14d ago

Mathematical Discourse is a new online, peer-reviewed mathematics journal, publishing videos of mathematics research talks of the highest quality. Our inaugural scientific and editorial boards are listed at the end of this message. Our goal is to promote and nourish a culture which values communication as an essential part of the research process. Giving a mathematical talk captures the human side of mathematics in a unique way, and supporting these human aspects of our discipline will be ever m...

‘Huge Breakthrough’ in the Math of Imbalance

Max G. Levy·Quanta Magazine·15d ago

One does not need a doctorate in mathematics to split 12 eager trivia buffs into two competitive teams. But consider that each person arrives with unique strengths and liabilities: One may be a geography obsessive with no ear for music, another could be a naturalist who doesn’t own a television, and another could be a cinephile who never reads. Balancing traits between two camps becomes a lot… Source

Palomar – a registry of Lean verified mathematics

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·17d ago

In recent months there has been a proliferation of AI-generated proofs of various old and new results, some of which have been formalized in the proof assistant language Lean. However, checking that a given Lean repository actually proves the claimed statement is somewhat non-trivial, especially for an audience which is not expert in the use of Lean: one has to first check that the claimed formal Lean statements have proofs that typecheck, that the proofs do not contain any “cheats” such as addi...

Theory of Fluids Enters the 21st Century

Charlie Wood·Quanta Magazine·19d ago

In the second half of the 20th century, a conceptual tsunami swept through physics. The discovery that our world emerges from a microscopic world of molecules, which emerges from an even more microscopic world of subatomic particles (which in turn emerges from even stranger stuff) triggered the rewriting of our theories of matter. But the revolution didn’t reach fluids. Source

How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part II

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·22d ago

This is the second installment of my look under the hood of the recently passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, looking at what each provision actually does and trying to suss out its actual impact on housing supply. You can read my previous essay on Title I of the Act here. This time I’ll look at Title II, “Building More in America,” and Title III, “Manufactured Housing For America,” which have 13 and 4 individual provisions respectively. Some of the most consequential chunks of this legislat...

A digestion of the proof of Sendov’s conjecture

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·24d ago

This post concerns the following conjecture of Sendov, as well as its strengthening by Phelps–Rodriguez: Conjecture 1 (Sendov’s conjecture) Let , and let be a degree polynomial with all zeroes in the unit disk. Then for every zero of , there exists a critical point of with . Conjecture 2 (Phelps–Rodriguez conjecture) Let , and let be a degree polynomial with all zeroes in the unit disk. Then for every zero of , there exists a critical point of with , unless is on the unit circle and is a scalar ...

Graduate Student Proves a Quantum Uncertainty Principle for Fractals

Shalma Wegsman·Quanta Magazine·24d ago

At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the uncertainty principle, which says that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can know about how fast it’s moving, and vice versa. Recently, this rule got a rare upgrade. The new uncertainty principle relates to fractals, shapes that remain equally complex no matter how much you… Source

Why Are Rivers So Mathematical?

Natalie Wolchover·Quanta Magazine·26d ago

A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in Texas. My maternal ancestors have dipped into its waters for generations, as I have on countless summer days. The Blanco is a tributary of the San Marcos, which flows into the Guadalupe, and on into the Gulf of… Source

Neutrinos From Deep Inside Earth Provide a New Picture of the Mantle

James Dinneen·Quanta Magazine·29d ago

In a laboratory 2 kilometers underground, a crane lowers Matt Depatie, a detector technologist, through a hatch into a white-walled cavern filled with about 7,000 tons of ultrapure water that glows as blue as wiper fluid in the light. “Splashdown,” Depatie says over a radio as he steps into an inflatable raft waiting below. Normally, the cavern is one of the darkest places on Earth, but today… Source

What Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Do for Housing Supply?

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·1mo ago

Home under construction, via Wikipedia.A few weeks ago the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. This is an enormous housing bill that’s been in the works for roughly a year — I first discussed it on Statecraft back in 2025 — and folks are optimistic that it will, per its description, “increase the supply of housing in America.”But actually understanding what, specifically, the law will do is tricky. Like many large pieces of legislation, this is an amalgamation of many smaller laws: the ...

The upper limits of biology

Works in Progress·Works in Progress·1mo ago

This piece is featured in Issue 25 of Works in Progress. Subscribe today to get Issue 25, and an issue every two months after, delivered straight to your door. 9th June 1973: Secretariat leaves the field behind at Belmont Park. Image credit: Getty Images.In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away to win by 31 lengths, nearly three quarters o...

A partial digestion of the HRT counterexample

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·1mo ago

A function of one variable can be translated in space by a spatial shift to obtain a new function and also modulated in frequency by a frequency shift to obtain a new function One can compose these two operations to obtain a time-frequency shift: As per the time-frequency uncertainty principle, the two shifts do not quite commute with each other. For instance, we have As such, is not a representation of the abelian group , but rather a portion of the Weyl representation of the Heisenberg group, ...

Corals Spin Tiny Vortices to Get Oxygen, but Not if It’s Too Hot

Marlowe Starling·Quanta Magazine·1mo ago

At first glance, corals present as little more than colorful rocks — piles of lobes, stalagmites, and branches poking out from the seafloor. They are anything but. Corals are complex creatures that form enduring colonies, and just like other animals they need oxygen to live. Across the living surface of coral, a frantic dance of survival takes place, invisible to our eyes and unknown to science… Source

A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came up with by Looking at the List of Specification Gaming Behaviours

slimemoldtimemold·Slime Mold Time Mold·1mo ago

Creatures bred for speed grow really tall and generate high velocities by falling over. An evolved player makes invalid moves far away in the board, causing opponent players to run out of memory and crash. A game-playing agent accrues points by falsely inserting its name as the author of high-value items. These bizarre exploits and dozens more can be found in the list of specification gaming behaviours [sic; British], a document put together by DeepMind Safety Research. “A reinforcement learning...

Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI

Konstantin Kakaes·Quanta Magazine·1mo ago

On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model — one not available to the public — had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” problem, a conjecture made in 1946 by Paul Erdős, the prolific, itinerant Hungarian mathematician. Erdős posed thousands of questions, but this one was special: It was both simple to explain and… Source

Indirect lessons from human alignment

dynomight·Dynomight·1mo ago

(Inspired by a post from Eli Tyre.) Many people make some variant of the following argument: Evolution is an “outer optimizer”. It is trying to make us maximize reproductive fitness. We are “inner optimizers”. We just do what feels good. But what feels good has been set by evolution, which is hoping that it will make us maximize reproductive fitness. But we don’t maximize reproductive fitness. In fact, birth rates are dropping everywhere. Therefore evolution failed. The standard interpretation i...

Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons?

John Pavlus·Quanta Magazine·1mo ago

I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI “reasoning”? Sorry for the air quotes. That punctuational side-eye was more common in 2024, when the specially trained cousins of LLMs now known as “large reasoning models,” or LRMs, were still new. Nowadays it may seem downright churlish, though, given that a “general-purpose reasoning model” from OpenAI solved a famous open mathematical… Source

Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery?

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·1mo ago

A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material. Chinese battery manufacturer CATL alone had more than 1,000 people devoted to solid-state battery research as of 2024, and battery manufacturers like BYD, LG, and Samsung are also working on the technology. US and European startups making solid-state batteries have collectively raised over $4 billion as of 2025.Solid-state batteries hav...

So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

dynomight·Dynomight·1mo ago

Humans make carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is bad for cognition. But plants turn carbon dioxide back into oxygen. And plants are the one true home decoration strategy. So maybe if you get a lot of plants, you can you can keep carbon dioxide in check and keep your brain working? It’s theoretically possible. It’s probably just barely possible in practice. But it won’t be easy. People produce ~1 kilogram of carbon dioxide per day. That’s around 5.7 × 10²³ molecules or 0.948 moles per hour. (You may...

Can We Lower Construction Costs with Cheaper Labor or Materials?

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·1mo ago

3D printed structure, via Wikipedia.Last time in our series on the nature of the construction productivity problem, we looked at economies of scale, finding that capturing economies of scale in homebuilding is difficult. Economies of scale primarily operate on the difference between the costs of the material inputs to some process and the cost of the final product. With housing construction, this ratio is already pretty low, not much higher than what we see in high-volume manufacturing industrie...

A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·1mo ago

The notorious Jacobian conjecture can be formulated concretely over the complex numbers as follows. Conjecture 1 (Jacobian Conjecture) Let be a polynomial map in complex variables, whose Jacobian is a non-zero constant. Then is invertible (with polynomial inverse). The condition that the Jacobian is non-zero is equivalent to being locally invertible. (The implication of local invertibility from non-vanishing Jacobian follows from the inverse function theorem; the converse implication can be deri...

Does creatine make you smarter?

dynomight·Dynomight·1mo ago

Is creatine a weird steroid-like hormone or drug? No. Creatine is a nutrient. Most omnivores eat a gram or two per day from meat. Your body also synthesizes a gram or two per day. You need creatine to deliver energy inside of cells. It is normal and non-weird. Does creatine increase testosterone? Unlikely. This concern comes from one study in 2009 on 16 male rugby players.1 But that study is considered extremely suspect. There have been at least twelve other studies that all found no change or p...

How Predictable Are Laws?

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·1mo ago

An enormous amount of ink has been spilled (some of it by me) on the trials and tribulations of complying with the National Environmental Policy Act, better known as NEPA. NEPA is what requires projects to perform years-long, thousand-plus page environmental impact studies before construction can begin, and suing a project for an insufficiently detailed environmental study is one of the chief ways environmental groups are able to slow down or stop projects they don’t like. And NEPA’s influence g...