Physicists discovered stars near the edge of the Milky Way travel more slowly than those closer to its center — a surprise suggesting our galaxy’s gravitational core may have less dark matter than previously thought.

By clocking the speed of stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy, MIT physicists have found that stars further out in the galactic disk are traveling more slowly than expected compared to stars that are closer to the galaxy’s center. The findings raise a surprising possibility: The Milky Way’s gravitational core may be lighter in mass, and contain less dark matter, than previously thought.

The new results are based on the team’s analysis of data taken by the Gaia and APOGEE instruments...

The science fiction author Arthur C...

Tissue contamination distracts AI models from making accurate real-world diagnoses. Human pathologists are extensively trained to detect when tissue samples from one patient mistakenly end up on another patient’s microscope slides (a problem known as tissue contamination). But such contamination can easily confuse artificial intelligence (AI) models, which are often trained in pristine, simulated environments, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

“We train AIs to tell ‘A’ versus ‘B’ in a very clean, artificial environment, but, in real life, the AI will see a variety of materials that it hasn’t trained on...

A new advancement in theoretical physics could, one day, help engineers develop new kinds of computer chips that might store information for longer in very small objects.

Add a dash of creamer to your morning coffee, and clouds of white liquid will swirl around your cup. But give it a few seconds, and those swirls will disappear, leaving you with an ordinary mug of brown liquid.

Something similar happens in quantum computer chips — devices that tap into the strange properties of the universe at its smallest scales — where information can quickly jumble up, limiting the memory capabilities of these tools.

That doesn’t have to be the case, said Rahul Nandkishore, associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

In a new coup for theoretical physics, he a...