Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells […]
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In 1992, mathematicians famously proved that seven “riffle shuffles” — the kind where a player splits a deck of cards into two piles, then uses their thumbs to interleave them back together in a zipperlike […]
Every time I write about particle physics, I encounter a moment of uncertainty about a quantity that, at first glance, ought to be clear. How many kinds of elementary particles should I say there are? […]
At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter thought to contain an ocean similar in some ways to one of our own. NASA engraved a metal plate […]
One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more […]
Every second, trillions of watts of solar energy — more than 10,000 times the energy used by modern humans — blast the Earth’s surface. Around 2.4 billion years ago, life took an evolutionary leap when […]
The following has been adapted from The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI by Kevin Hartnett. Terry Tao has never been afraid of unconventional ideas. In November 2014, […]
I t was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted […]
What is the future of gene editing with CRISPR? Has AI changed mathematics forever? Will we find other civilizations in the universe? What if we’ve been wrong about dark energy all along? These are just […]
In 1973, John Archibald Wheeler described the relationship between space and matter in two sentences: “Space acts on matter, telling it how to move. In turn, matter reacts back on space, telling it how to […]
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