In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10% of Georgia’s polling sites had closed over the […]
In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10% of Georgia’s polling sites had closed over the […]
At the end of last year, the tech giant IBM announced what might sound like a milestone in quantum computing: the first-ever chip, called the Condor, with more than 1,000 quantum bits, or qubits. Given […]
Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place? This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a […]
Your grade school teacher probably didn’t show you how to add 20-digit numbers. But if you know how to add smaller numbers, all you need is paper and pencil and a bit of patience. Start […]
Random processes take place all around us. It rains one day but not the next; stocks and bonds gain and lose value; traffic jams coalesce and disappear. Because they’re governed by numerous factors that interact […]
In 2020, scientists detected a gas called phosphine in the atmosphere of an Earth-size rocky planet. Knowing of no way that phosphine could be produced except through biological processes, “the scientists assert that something now […]
Electroconvulsive therapy has a public relations problem. The treatment, which sends electric currents through the brain to induce a brief seizure, has barbaric, inhumane connotations — for example, it was portrayed as a sadistic punishment […]
Physicists have begun to explore the proton as if it were a subatomic planet. Cutaway maps display newfound details of the particle’s interior. The proton’s core features pressures more intense than in any other known […]
Quantum teleportation isn’t just science fiction; it’s entirely real and happening in laboratories today. But teleporting quantum particles and information is a far cry from beaming people through space. In some ways, it’s even more […]
It took a long time for Claire Voisin to fall in love with mathematics. That’s not to say she ever disliked the subject. Growing up in France — the 10th of 12 children — she […]
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