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To operate reliably in dynamic real-world settings, robots should be able to acquire new skills quickly without undergoing extensive additional training. Most existing robotic systems, however, primarily perform well on the ...

Standing on the sandy, windswept shores of Provincetown, Massachusetts, people may find themselves squinting at the horizon, waiting for a whale to make its grand entrance with a spectacular breach.

Quasiparticles arise from the complex interaction of many particles in solids; for example, we describe lattice vibrations in crystals as phonons. Fractons are exotic quasiparticles that occur at the vertices of magnetic ...

Long polymer chains are everywhere: in synthetic materials, soft matter, biological systems such as chromosomes, and mathematical models of filaments and knots. When many such chains are densely packed, they form what physicists ...

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, roughly the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more ...

Scrambling through dense salal in the dark, weaving between the majestic western red cedars of northern Haida Gwaii, I could barely imagine where we were just days before—crossing Dixon Entrance off the coast in an open skiff, ...

Astronomers have detected an enormous cloud of gas tens of millions of degrees hot surrounding one of the most extreme structures known in the early universe. The study offers one of the clearest views yet of a galaxy cluster ...

Quantum computers hold great promise for applications from drug discovery to cybersecurity. Yet figuring out what would give quantum computers their edge over everyday "classical" computers is a subtle problem. A new theoretical ...

Biologists, zoologists and psychologists have been trying to trace the origins of human language for centuries. One well-known theory, known as the social brain hypothesis, suggests that increasingly complex social lives ...

Fire and medical officials have issued warnings about a supplement offered to Western wildland firefighters who have been exposed to toxic chemicals while battling some of the country's biggest blazes.

An international team of astrophysicists and plasma physicists has provided the first experimental evidence that strong magnetic fields surrounding active stars can completely suppress coronal mass ejections. This offers ...

So far, most of the minerals found on Mars tell a story of lava poured out by ancient volcanoes, followed by long stretches in which water trickled through and slowly reshaped the rock. However, some rocks scattered across ...