It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood pressure skyrockets. Goose bumps […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Jane Richardson never considered herself an artist. Then, in the late 1970s, the structural biologist found herself in need of some colored pencils, pastels and sketching paper. Richardson, a professor of biochemistry at Duke University, […]
To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases — the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the […]
On the morning of April 4, physicists filed into a third-floor meeting room at Harvard University’s Jefferson Laboratory. Word had gotten out that there would be a big announcement from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument […]
Like many children of his generation, raised on a steady diet of Jurassic Park and its sequels, Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer wanted to be a paleontologist when he grew up. Unlike most, he came close. Rather than […]
Within just a few years, artificial intelligence systems that sometimes seem to display almost human characteristics have gone from science fiction to apps on your phone. But there’s another AI-influenced frontier that is developing rapidly […]
Nearly a century ago, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is getting larger. Modern measurements of how fast it is expanding disagree, however, suggesting that our understanding of the laws of physics might be off. […]
After Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, he spent the next decade trying to come up with a theory of gravity. But for years, he kept running up against a problem. […]
Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a […]
In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere — the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ […]
Recent Comments