Our recent suite of puzzles featured the humble double-pan balance scale, historically a symbol of commerce and government, art and science. Balance scales are also popular in recreational mathematics. Balance puzzles require clear, logical reasoning […]
Neuroscientists, being interested in how brains work, naturally focus on neurons, the cells that can convey elements of sense and thought to each other via electrical impulses. But equally worthy of study is a substance […]
Everybody gets older, although not everyone ages in the same way. For many people, late life includes a deterioration of health brought on by age-related disease. Yet there are also people who retain a more […]
Physical scientists seem to find the phenomenon of chaos everywhere: in the orbits of planets, in weather systems, in a river’s swirling eddies. For nearly three decades, ecologists considered chaos in the living world to […]
The Kakeya conjecture sounds like a brain teaser. Place a needle flat on a table. How much area do you need in order to be able to turn it so that it points in all […]
As soon as President Biden unveiled the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on July 11, Massimo Pascale and his team sprang into action. Coordinating over Slack, Pascale, an astrophysicist at the […]
If you’ve been following the math news this month, you know that the 35-year-old number theorist James Maynard won a Fields Medal — the highest honor for a mathematician. Maynard likes math questions that “are […]
Stripes of gas wind and wrap through the darkness, twisting into knots that are poised to collapse into stars. And it all happens in the palm of Nia Imara’s hand. The stormy clouds of gas […]
When Fu-Shuang Li, a biochemist and research scientist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, needed some pollen for his research, he knew just where to go. Every spring, the pitch pine trees ringing Walden […]
A striking new proof in quantum computational complexity might best be understood with a playful thought experiment. Run a bath, then dump a bunch of floating bar magnets into the water. Each magnet will flip […]
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