Percentile

A handful of coins drops onto a table — heads and tails land wherever they please. The same goes for an instantaneous snapshot of a quantum chain: in some places a particle is present, in others it is not. But behind the disorder lurks a precise angle. In this work, a chain of particles closed into a ring was considered. It was divided into four arcs: two were measured, two were left untouched.

A mountain pass connects two valleys. In one, the protein is folded; in the other, it is unfolded. To get from one to the other, you must cross the saddle — the highest point on the path. In protein science, this point is called the transition state, and the coordinate that shows the distance to it is the committor.

A disease outbreak is like a wildfire: the fire runs through dry grass, and its speed depends on wind and humidity. But an infection has its own 'wind'—how often people infect each other. When this rate changes along with the fraction of already infected, the epidemic wave can behave differently.

An AI predicting room acoustics is like a student taking an exam with a cheat sheet. If the test points are the same as the training ones, the model simply memorizes the acoustic 'fingerprint' of each position — like a student recognizing a question by the dog-eared corner.

In boiling soup, molecules collide chaotically and react. But if you measure how their concentrations change, patterns emerge. This is how carbon chemical networks work — mixtures of molecules that spontaneously 'cook' information, turning each reaction into an elementary computation. Previously they were used only for modeling nature.

When you're planning a renovation, you don't buy paint by eye: you measure the wall area. In science, deciding how many samples to collect is a similar guess, but the stakes are higher. Skimp on samples, and your study becomes a lottery: you might miss a real effect, or you might mistake noise for a discovery. Overshoot, and you're wasting tubes, months, and, in animal experiments, lives.

After a game of Scrabble, the board looks like a mosaic: tiles are scattered but form a connected pattern — islands of words in a sea of empty cells. Such a pattern can be described mathematically, but usually that requires complex rules.

The best AI assistant for scientists scored worse on this exam than a C student on a pop quiz. Just 21% correct answers, and that's the ceiling for the four strongest models. The problems for the new test were written not by programmers but by graduate students: people who deal with real science every day. The test is called COMPOSITE-STEM.

An ECG is not just a wavy line on paper. Like a diary, it records the state of the entire heart: rhythm, wall thickness, and hints of future problems. But currently, programs that learn to read this diary are trained on very narrow tasks — mostly detecting arrhythmias. That's like teaching someone to understand a book by showing them only a list of typos.