Determining the least expensive path for a new subway line underneath a metropolis like New York City is a colossal planning challenge—involving thousands of potential routes through hundreds of city ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

Every ecosystem runs on balance between stealth and detection. This video explores how animals evolved camouflage using light-bending nanostructures, pigment cells, and body pattern algorithms — and ...

A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Optimal Blue and 26 U.S. mortgage lenders, alleging that Optimal Blue's analytics tools facilitated a pricing cartel. The suit claims this arrangement led ...

The police surveillance company Flock has built an enormous nationwide license plate tracking system, which streams records of Americans’ comings and goings into a private national database that it ...

The modern internet is ruled by algorithms. When you boot up Instagram, for example, what you see in your feed is strategically sorted by the app's AI based on your past activity to keep you engaged ...

Abstract: Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is widely used for dimensionality reduction of large datasets and is an important feature extraction technique for source separation. However, NMF ...

For non-planar graphs, such solutions are computationally intractable," explained the researchers. The algorithm relies on the Kac-Ward formalism, a mathematical method that allows exact computation ...

In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, several blind men each describe a different part of an elephant they are touching – a sharp tusk, a flexible trunk, or a broad leg – and disagree ...