On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2021, Silvio Decurtins was leafing through a paper with a title that could have been pulled from a comic book for mathematically inclined teens: “Plato’s Cube and […]
On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2021, Silvio Decurtins was leafing through a paper with a title that could have been pulled from a comic book for mathematically inclined teens: “Plato’s Cube and […]
Enough pints of beer can have you falling off your bar stool or loudly reciting lyrics to early 2000s jams to total strangers, because alcohol can get past one of the strongest defenses in the […]
On a sunny day in late 1987, a Chevy van drove down a curvy wooded path on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The hulking vehicle, named Navlab, wasn’t notable for its beauty […]
As with so much in mathematics, the proof started with coffee. In September 2019, Kathryn Mann of Cornell University visited Kingston, Ontario, to give a guest lecture at Queen’s University. Afterward, she sat down with […]
Sailors have spun yarns for centuries about gigantic rogue waves that could suddenly come out of nowhere to capsize the ships of unwary mariners. Scientists didn’t believe them because the stories seemed at odds with […]
In April, researchers in China reported that they had initiated pregnancies in monkeys through a procedure seemingly much like in vitro fertilization (IVF), in which embryos created in a dish were implanted in the uteruses […]
A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the simplest nuclear systems. […]
Suppose you have a thousand-page book, but each page has only a single line of text. You’re supposed to extract the information contained in the book using a scanner, only this particular scanner systematically goes […]
As a boy growing up in Rochester, England, Chris German knew of his family’s strong maritime tradition, and he had no intention of continuing it. One of his grandfathers had served in the Royal Navy […]
Heat death held a morbid fascination for Victorian-era physicists. It was an early example of how everyday physics connects to the grandest themes in cosmology. Drop ice cubes into a glass of water, and you […]
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