Nature, red in tooth and claw, is rife with organisms that eat their neighbors to get ahead. But in the systems studied by the theoretical ecologist Holly Moeller, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution and […]
Nature, red in tooth and claw, is rife with organisms that eat their neighbors to get ahead. But in the systems studied by the theoretical ecologist Holly Moeller, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution and […]
One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard — and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire plane […]
Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were […]
Many years ago, I learned to program on an old Symbolics Lisp Machine. The operating system had a built-in command spelled “DWIM,” short for “Do What I Mean.” If I typed a command and got […]
There are times and places in the universe that experiments cannot reach, and may never be able to reach. What exactly goes on inside black holes, and what happened in the first fractions of a […]
It’s often subtle at first. A lost phone. A forgotten word. A missed appointment. By the time a person walks into a doctor’s office, worried about signs of forgetfulness or failing cognition, the changes to […]
Quantum computers get a lot of hype, but the truth is we’re still not sure what they’ll be good for. These devices leverage the peculiar physics of the subatomic world and have the potential to […]
In December 1977, a revolutionary paper quietly appeared in the Journal d’Analyse Mathématique, a specialty mathematics journal. The author, Hillel Furstenberg, did not claim any thrilling — or even new — results. He’d simply offered […]
Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang. […]
In the simple game of Wordle, players have to guess a secret five-letter word in six or fewer turns based on clues about the presence and location of letters revealed by their previous guesses. While […]
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