When Pascal Gagneux envisions malaria parasites and other pathogens interacting with the surfaces of a host’s cells, he pictures a miniature rainforest with pathogenic particles flying overhead like colorful birds. The canopy consists of branching […]
They say that in art, constraints lead to creativity. The same seems to be true of the universe. By placing limits on nature, the laws of physics squeeze out reality’s most fantastical creations. Limit light’s […]
A hundred years ago, the Japanese scientist Y. Shirai published a mysterious finding: When Shirai transplanted tumor tissue into a mouse’s body, the tissue was destroyed by its immune system. But when tumors were grafted […]
In the 1930s, the French physicist Pierre Auger placed Geiger counters along a ridge in the Alps and observed that they would sometimes spontaneously click at the same time, even when they were up to […]
When you walk into a room full of people, you can speculate about all sorts of things, from political leanings to TV viewing habits. But if the room has at least six people, you can […]
The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency […]
They are invisible at first. In their Southeast Asian forest homes, they grow as thin strands of cells, foreign fibers sometimes more than 10 meters long that weave through the vital tissues of their vine […]
We solved our last Insights puzzle by performing some arithmetic on a simple version of a complex problem in order to discover its patterns. Often this approach can reveal hidden insights. You can also use […]
In high school physics, we learn about Newton’s second law of motion — force equals mass times acceleration — through simple examples of a single force (say, gravity) acting on an object of some mass. […]
During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding […]
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