Category: Quantum Stuff

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. You’re probably familiar with the concept of evolution. Living things evolve by accumulating genetic changes, which are then weeded out or preserved through a process of natural selection. Turns out the same thing happens in music. And by using the same software that’s used to… Continue reading Researchers Analyzed Folk Music like It Was Mutating DNA: They Found Amazing Parallels between Life and Art

Over the decades, mathematicians made partial progress toward a proof. They showed, for instance, that the conjecture was true for particular types of primitive sets. Still, “it felt like we weren’t really all that close to it before Jared started working on it,” said Greg Martin, a mathematician at the University of British Columbia who… Continue reading Graduate Student’s Side Project Proves Prime Number Conjecture

From the window of a passenger plane flying over the Amazon, the view is breathtaking. “It’s just miles across of river and river islands,” said Lukas Musher, a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences. The massive rivers below branch into a dense, treelike network that has continuously rearranged itself over hundreds of… Continue reading Reshuffled Rivers Bolster the Amazon’s Hyper-Biodiversity

Officials from 175 countries agreed yesterday to craft a global treaty over the next two years with the aim of ending plastic pollution. The final treaty could be a game-changer for lands and oceans awash in plastic bottles and packaging. Castoff plastics choke and entangle animals, are ingested by people as tiny particles in food,… Continue reading Countries Pave the Way to End Plastic Pollution

The first major attempt to replicate striking evidence of the ‘cosmic dawn’—the appearance of the Universe’s first stars 180 million years after the Big Bang—has muddled the picture. Four years after radio astronomers reported finding a signature of the cosmic dawn, radio astronomer Ravi Subrahmanyan and his collaborators describe how they floated an antenna on… Continue reading New Result Casts Doubt on ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Claim

Explore Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve on a plot. Such a bump is the unmistakable signature of “resonance,” one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in… Continue reading How the Physics of Resonance Shapes Reality

Imaginary numbers are not imaginary at all. The truth is, they have had far more impact on our lives than anything truly imaginary ever could. Without imaginary numbers, and the vital role they played in putting electricity into homes, factories, and internet server-farms, the modern world would not exist. Students who might complain to their… Continue reading Imaginary Numbers Are Reality

As Ukrainian researchers have feared for their lives and careers after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, mathematicians have been grappling over what to do about a prominent mathematical conference that was set to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in July. The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is “the largest and most significant conference on pure and… Continue reading Mathematicians Protest Russia Hosting Major Conference

Researchers soon started exploring how to apply this advance to the maximum flow problem. The idea is to imagine our highway network as a network of wires and to turn up the resistance on the highways that don’t have much available capacity, to discourage electrons from running through them. Because of Spielman and Teng, we… Continue reading Researchers Achieve ‘Absurdly Fast’ Algorithm for Network Flow

Think of the dead grandparents and everything they’ll miss. All the milestones, the middle school graduations and bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras. All the victories, on soccer fields or piano recital halls. All the ordinary shared moments, dancing to “Baby Beluga,” or making banana bread, building extravagant Lego towers, watching The Wizard of Oz and cuddling… Continue reading The Devastating Loss of Grandparents among One Million COVID Dead