The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

In previous episodes of this long-running series looking at the world of high-quality audio, at every point we’ve stayed in the real world of physical audio hardware. From the human ear to the ...

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) predicted Wednesday that dozens of Republicans may ultimately support legislation requiring the Department of Justice to release files related to convicted sex offender ...

Package Python apps for easy delivery as executables, dig into Python 3.14's new debugging interface, and get live coding help for making sense of datasets. Want extra credit? Try wrangling Python ...

Stop losing your files. It's 2025, and you're still scrolling through folders named "New Folder" and "Untitled." Here's the one thing that will save your hair and sanity: a simple, consistent naming ...

For centuries, we have relied on human intuition, behavioral cues, and painstaking manual analysis to determine veracity in written communications. Enter artificial intelligence. AI algorithms, ...

State Key Laboratory of Anti-Infective Drug Discovery and Development, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China Key Laboratory of Tropical Biological ...

People store large quantities of data in their electronic devices and transfer some of this data to others, whether for professional or personal reasons. Data compression methods are thus of the ...

Concerns about the risks posed by tampered images have been showing up regularly in the research over the past couple of years, particularly in light of a new surge of AI-based image-editing ...

Windows Windows 3.1 included a red and yellow 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme so garish it was long assumed to be a joke, so I tracked down Microsoft's original UI designer to get the true story Windows ...