When you throw a ball in the air, the equations of classical physics will tell you exactly what path the ball will take as it falls, and when and where it will land. But if you were to squeeze that same ball down to the size of an atom or smaller, it would behave in ways beyond anything that classical physics can predict.
Or so we’ve thought.
MIT scientists have now shown that certain mathematical ideas from everyday classical physics can be used to describe the often weird and nonintuitive behavior that occurs at the quantum, subatomic scale.
Nothing rivals the human brain’s complexity. Its 86 billion neurons and 85 billion other cells make an estimated 100 trillion connections. If the brain were a computer, it would perform an exaflop (a billion-billion) mathematical calculations every second and use the equivalent of only 20 watts of power. As impressive as the brain is, neurologists can’t fully explain how neurons work together.
To help find answers, researchers at the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS) at Georgia Tech are using math, data, and AI to unlock the secrets of thought. Together they are helping turn the brain’s raw electrical “noise” into real insights about how people think, move, and perceive the world.
Fair warning: Prepare your neurons for the complexity of this brain research ahead.
The Individual Brain Charting (IBC) project has released its fifth and largest update of high-resolution fMRI data, adding a new set of cognitive tasks to one of the most detailed brain-mapping datasets available today. The dataset, which is openly accessible through EBRAINS, is described in a new publication in Nature Scientific Data.
The new release expands the dataset with 18 tasks collected from 11 participants under tightly controlled, standardised conditions – bringing many of them close to 40 hours of scanned data each.
The IBC project launched in 2014 and was funded by the Human Brain Project. It aims to map how individual brains respond across a wide range of cognitive functions. By repeatedly scanning the same participants with diverse tasks – from mathematics and spatial navigation to emotion recognition, reward processing, and working memory – the team is building an exceptionally rich resource for studying individual variability in brain organization.
When you throw a ball in the air, the equations of classical physics will tell you exactly what path the ball will take as it falls, and when and where it will land. But if you were to squeeze that same ball down to the size of an atom or smaller, it would behave in ways beyond anything that classical physics can predict.
Or so we’ve thought.
MIT scientists have now shown that certain mathematical ideas from everyday classical physics can be used to describe the often weird and nonintuitive behavior that occurs at the quantum, subatomic scale.
There’s something quietly unsettling about placing a photograph of a human neuron next to a simulated image of the large-scale cosmic web. The two look almost identical: delicate, branching filaments connecting dense clusters, with vast open spaces in between. One fits inside your skull. The other stretches across billions of light-years. The resemblance is hard to dismiss, and for a growing number of researchers, it’s far more than a visual coincidence.
What started as a striking observation in cosmology and neuroscience has evolved into a serious theoretical question. Could the universe, at its most fundamental level, operate the way a brain does? The ideas being put forward aren’t purely philosophical. Some of them come with testable mathematics, published peer-reviewed papers, and the names of well-regarded physicists attached. What follows is an honest look at where the science currently stands.
The estimated 200 billion detectable galaxies aren’t distributed randomly, but are lumped together by gravity into clusters that form even larger clusters, which are connected to one another by “galactic filaments,” long thin threads of galaxies. This vast architecture is what scientists call the cosmic web. When you zoom far enough out, the structure of the entire observable universe begins to take on a shape that looks startlingly familiar.
A joint theoretical study by the University of Innsbruck and Zhejiang University has uncovered the microscopic origin of a striking quantum phenomenon: a periodically driven gas of ultracold atoms that simply refuses to heat up, defying classical expectations.
Push a swing repeatedly in rhythm, and it swings higher and higher, absorbing more and more energy. A quantum gas, however, can behave very differently. Under periodic kicks, quantum interference can freeze energy absorption entirely, a phenomenon known as dynamical localization. Whether this survives when particles interact with each other has been a long-standing open question. A 2025 experiment by the research group of Hanns-Christoph Nägerl at the Department of Experimental Physics confirmed that it can. But the microscopic reasons remained until now unclear.
A new theoretical study by Prof. Lei Ying’s team at Zhejiang University, in collaboration with Prof. Hanns-Christoph Nägerl’s group at the University of Innsbruck, published in Physical Review Letters, provides the missing explanation. The team developed a mathematical framework that transforms the complex-driven many-body problem into a tractable lattice model. This reveals that interactions introduce a universal power-law structure that reshapes localization—and ultimately drives its breakdown at intermediate interaction strengths.
A team of international researchers, including an Aston University researcher, has cracked the code on how “breather” laser pulses work, creating a single mathematical model that explains two completely different laser behaviors for the first time. Ultrafast lasers emit extremely short pulses of light, lasting only picoseconds or femtoseconds, making them essential for applications ranging from eye surgery and biomedical imaging to precision materials processing and advanced manufacturing.
The work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters. By understanding laser behaviors better, scientists will be able to control them, making lasers more reliable and better suited to specific applications.
An ultrafast laser produces pulses of light that circulate within the laser cavity, where they can evolve into stable structures called solitons. Solitons tend to maintain their shape as they travel, unlike conventional light pulses which spread out. Usually, these solitons are identical and regular, like a heartbeat, known as steady-state emission. In a “breather” laser, the solitons change over time and successive cavity round trips, growing and shrinking before repeating the cycle, like a breathing pattern. This is an example of a non-equilibrium state, where the laser output does not remain constant but keeps evolving over time.