Back in 2000, when Michael Elowitz of the California Institute of Technology was still a grad student at Princeton University, he accomplished a remarkable feat in the young field of synthetic biology: He became one […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Réunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, is like a marshmallow hovering above the business end of a blowtorch. It sits above one of Earth’s mantle plumes — a tower of superheated rock […]
Imagine you’re a general in ancient times and you want to keep your troop counts secret from your enemies. But you also need to know this information yourself. So you turn to a math trick […]
The notion of dimension at first seems intuitive. Glancing out the window we might see a crow sitting atop a cramped flagpole experiencing zero dimensions, a robin on a telephone wire constrained to one, a […]
One of the most important pieces of mathematical knowledge was on the verge of being lost, maybe forever. Now, a new book hopes to save it. The Disc Embedding Theorem rewrites a proof completed in […]
In 1990, an international team of scientists began an ambitious attempt to sequence the human genome. By 2001 the Human Genome Project (HGP) had prepared a rough draft, and in April 2003, the draft sequence […]
The prospects for directly testing a theory of quantum gravity are poor, to put it mildly. To probe the ultra-tiny Planck scale, where quantum gravitational effects appear, you would need a particle accelerator as big […]
Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the two. As Alan Turing put it in 1952: “We are not […]
Imagine the human genome as a string stretching out for the length of a football field, with all the genes that encode proteins clustered at the end near your feet. Take two big steps forward; […]
In 2013, a masters student in physics named Paul Erker went combing through textbooks and papers looking for an explanation of what a clock is. “Time is what a clock measures,” Albert Einstein famously quipped; […]
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