Yang Li

Science is a vast kitchen where scientist-cooks seek new recipes. Once, they sifted ingredients by hand; now artificial intelligence, a seasoned chef, lends a hand. AI memorizes millions of flavors and suggests surprising pairings: through information search, the algorithm uncovers hidden patterns.

A musical instrument sounds cleaner when its strings don't touch anything extraneous. Roughly the same principle drives the new optical magnetometer: a glass cuvette the size of a matchbox is filled with rubidium vapor, and its walls are coated with a thin layer of paraffin, like wax on a ski track.