For decades, astronomers have been perplexed by planetary magnetic fields. In our own solar system, there is no rule that explains which worlds generate these magnetic sheaths: Earth, for example, has one, but its sister […]
For decades, astronomers have been perplexed by planetary magnetic fields. In our own solar system, there is no rule that explains which worlds generate these magnetic sheaths: Earth, for example, has one, but its sister […]
Biologists have understood the broad contours of the rules of inheritance for more than a century: that genes are passed down from parent to child within species. But in more recent years, they have also […]
In August 2013, dozens of renowned theoretical physicists gathered in Santa Barbara, California, to discuss a crisis. Their tenuous understanding of black holes was falling apart. Viewed from afar, as if through a telescope, a […]
Richard Dedekind was a 19th-century mathematical giant, responsible for reshaping the field right down to its foundations. He was the first to give a rigorous definition of infinity; he also came up with the definition […]
Does an unseen force lurk within genetics? Biologists have made enormous strides over the past 100 years in understanding the role of the millions of parcels that convey our genetic information — DNA, RNA and […]
Yael Tauman Kalai is a pioneering theoretical computer scientist who’s won impressive awards and changed the way people think about the internet. But as a kid, she wasn’t exactly a model student. “I was a […]
Aristotle argued almost 2,400 years ago that a perfect vacuum could never exist. Today, the concept of nothingness figures at least implicitly into almost every theory of modern physics. In this episode closing out season […]
On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory […]
Like a bright city in the middle of a barren desert, our galactic neighborhood is enveloped by a cosmic void — an enormous, almost unfathomably empty pocket of space. Recently, sky surveys have spotted thousands […]
Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled into a surreal world. Ling realized that the […]
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