To survive in the frigid ocean waters around the Arctic and Antarctica, marine life evolved many defenses against the lethal cold. One common adaptation is the ability to make antifreezing proteins (AFPs) that prevent ice […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve […]
We like to think of ourselves as unique. That conceit may even be true when it comes to our cosmic neighborhood: Despite the fact that planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune appear to […]
In the 1950s, four decades before he won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to game theory and his story inspired the book and film “A Beautiful Mind,” the mathematician John Nash proved one of […]
Seen through a microscope, the hairy, slipper-shaped aquatic microbe Paramecium bursaria often looks as if it is bursting at the seams with tiny green marbles. Yet the verdant spheres are a different organism altogether: Chlorella, […]
Last December, a gloopy ooze of lava began extruding out of the summit of La Soufrière, a volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. The effusion was slow at first; no one was threatened. […]
In the April Insights puzzle, I tried to guide readers down a path that might be best described as “experimental mathematics.” The goal was to rediscover two constants by iterating simple arithmetic procedures. Readers found […]
“There are many different pathways into mathematics,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “There is the stereotype that interest in math displays itself early. That is definitely not true in […]
In the known universe, there is nothing quite like a neutron star. Born from supernovas, these objects contain a star-size mass in a city-size space. This unique trait has led scientists to believe that some […]
Problems in mathematics often have a simple “yes or no” structure: Is this statement true or false? But the most enduring and interesting problems propagate through generations, the products of decades of work, like the […]
Recent Comments