Previous studies of horizontal transfers have often focused on the mobile genetic elements called transposons. These privileged “jumping genes” can hop around the genome of an organism by replicating themselves and inserting their copies. Their sole concern is to promote their own survival within the genome rather than the fitness of the organism, which is… Continue reading Selfish, Virus-Like DNA Can Carry Genes Between Species
Category: Quantum Stuff
This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body
One morning in December 2004, elders and children were wandering on the shore of Strait Island in the Bay of Bengal when one of them noticed something odd. The sea level was low, and weird-looking creatures that normally inhabit the deep twilight zone of the ocean were bobbing near the water’s surface. “Sare ukkuburuko!”—the sea… Continue reading This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body
AI Chatbots Could Help Provide Therapy, but Caution Is Needed
On Reddit forums, many users discussing mental health have enthused about their interactions with ChatGPT—OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot, which conducts humanlike conversations by predicting the likely next word in a sentence. “ChatGPT is better than my therapist,” one user wrote, adding that the program listened and responded as the person talked about their struggles with… Continue reading AI Chatbots Could Help Provide Therapy, but Caution Is Needed
Math That Lets You Think Locally but Act Globally
In math, as in life, small choices can have big consequences. This is especially true in graph theory, a field that studies networks of objects and the connections between them. Here’s a little puzzle to help you see why. Given six dots, your goal is to connect them to each other with line segments so… Continue reading Math That Lets You Think Locally but Act Globally
New Proof Shows That ‘Expander’ Graphs Synchronize
Melody and Silence In the early 1990s, together with his student Shinya Watanabe, Strogatz showed that Kuramoto’s solution was not only possible, but all but inevitable, even for a finite number of oscillators. In 2011, Richard Taylor of the Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization chipped away at Kuramoto’s requirement that the graph be complete. He… Continue reading New Proof Shows That ‘Expander’ Graphs Synchronize
A New Therapy for Multiple Personality Disorder Helps a Woman with 12 Selves
When Ella time traveled in my office for the first time, I did not realize what was happening right away. She was sitting comfortably in a chair, her hands folded, her back straight and her feet flat on the floor. There was no dramatic change, no shuddering or twitching. But then I saw it: a… Continue reading A New Therapy for Multiple Personality Disorder Helps a Woman with 12 Selves
How (Nearly) Nothing Might Solve Cosmology’s Biggest Questions
“The Hubble tension has lasted a decade so far because it is a hard problem,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who uses supernovas to estimate the Hubble constant. “The obvious issues have been checked and the data has improved, so the dilemma deepens.” Now, the hope is that studying nearly nothing… Continue reading How (Nearly) Nothing Might Solve Cosmology’s Biggest Questions
Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis
Their findings are “the most detailed example to date” of what happens to the brain of an insect undergoing metamorphosis, said Deniz Erezyilmaz, a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Oxford’s Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior who used to work in Truman’s lab but wasn’t involved in this work. The results may apply… Continue reading Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis
Does Nothingness Exist? | Quanta Magazine
Aristotle argued almost 2,400 years ago that a perfect vacuum could never exist. Today, the concept of nothingness figures at least implicitly into almost every theory of modern physics. In this episode closing out season 2 of “The Joy of Why,” the theoretical physicist Isabel Garcia Garcia of New York University and the Institute for… Continue reading Does Nothingness Exist? | Quanta Magazine
The Physicist Who Bets That Gravity Can’t Be Quantized
Quanta Magazine > 0; if (typeof predicate !== ‘function’) { throw new TypeError(‘predicate must be a function’); } var thisArg = arguments[1]; var k = 0; while (k We care about your data, and we’d like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.Agree… Continue reading The Physicist Who Bets That Gravity Can’t Be Quantized