Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been wildly successful at describing how gravity works and how it shapes the large-scale structure of the universe. It’s summed up in a saying by the physicist John […]
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been wildly successful at describing how gravity works and how it shapes the large-scale structure of the universe. It’s summed up in a saying by the physicist John […]
Evolution is a complicated thing. Much of modern evolutionary biology seeks to reconcile the seeming randomness of the forces behind the process — how mutations occur, for example — with the fundamental principles that apply […]
Nearly a century ago, the evolutionary theorist Sewall Wright imagined a landscape of mountains and valleys. The peaks represented states of high evolutionary fitness for organisms, while the troughs between them represented states of low […]
After a year of trial and error, Liyang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into a microscopic strand half the width of an E.coli bacterium — just thin enough to allow a […]
Like many math students, I had dreams of mathematical greatness. I thought I was close once. A difficult algebra problem in college kept me working late into the night. After hours of struggle, I felt […]
From the moment you swallow a bite of food to the moment it exits your body, the gut is toiling to process this strange outside material. It has to break chunks down into small bits. […]
In life, we sometimes have to make decisions without all the information we want; that’s true in computer science, too. This is the realm of online algorithms — which, despite their name, don’t necessarily involve […]
In mathematics, simple rules can unlock universes of complexity and beauty. Take the famous Fibonacci sequence, which is defined as follows: It begins with 1 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of […]
When Covid-19 sent people home in early 2020, the computer scientist Tom Zahavy rediscovered chess. He had played as a kid and had recently read Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, a memoir of the grandmaster’s 1997 […]
When you were a child, it seemed like an ingenious plan: Splash hot water on your face and stagger into the kitchen, letting out a moan that could make angels cry. One touch of your […]
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