Scientific progress has been inseparable from better measurements. Before 1927, only human ingenuity seemed to limit how precisely we could measure things. Then Werner Heisenberg discovered that quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental limit on the […]
For nearly two centuries, all kinds of researchers interested in how fluids flow have turned to the Navier-Stokes equations. But mathematicians still harbor basic questions about them. Foremost among them: How well do the equations […]
On October 9, 2009, a two-ton rocket smashed into the moon traveling at 9,000 kilometers per hour. As it exploded in a shower of dust and heated the lunar surface to hundreds of degrees, the […]
When scientists think about the movement of microbes between animal species, we generally focus on “spillover” events: when pathogens move from animals to humans. But pathogen transmission isn’t a one-way street. Humans appear to have […]
Once, long ago, the only players in the grand drama of life, predation and death were invisibly small and simple cells. Archaea and bacteria jigged and whirled through seas and ponds, assembled themselves into fortresses […]
When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their “expectation threshold” conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves. Their claim — a broad assertion about mathematical objects called random graphs — seemed […]
In a recent paper, Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University has settled an 85-year-old conjecture about one of math’s most ancient obsessions: the solutions to polynomial equations such as x2 – 3x + 2 = 0. […]
We’ve heard a lot about the immune system over the last couple of years of the COVID-19 pandemic, but of course our immune system fights off much more than the coronavirus. And while the immune […]
In 1989, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, popularizer of the term “black hole,” proposed a radical new way to think about the universe. Quantum particles may shape-shift and disappear, but we can always count on […]
Playing the mating game is risky. Organisms must cope with the existential risk that swiping right on the wrong choice could doom future generations to a lifetime of bad genes. They also have to contend […]
Recent Comments