Category: Quantum Stuff

Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius, and while some went cross-country skiing, Juan Aguilera, a set theorist at the Vienna University of Technology, preferred to linger in the… Continue reading Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?

Sahara Dust Clouds Are Heading to Florida and Beyond Clouds of dust blown off the Saharan Desert into the southeastern U.S. could affect local weather and make sunrises and sunsets particularly vivid By Meghan Bartels edited by Dean Visser Each year, seasonal winds carry tens of millions of tons of Saharan dust across the Atlantic… Continue reading Sahara Dust Clouds Are Heading to Florida and Beyond

Megalodon Diets, Teeth Sensitivity and a Bunch of Vaccine News It’s one step forward and two steps back for vaccine policy in the U.S. Plus, we discuss the fishy origins of sensitive teeth and megalodon diets. By Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! It may… Continue reading Are Ancient Fish Responsible for Your Sensitive Teeth?

AI Found a ‘Magic Potion’ That Can Bring Dead Batteries Back to Life Electric vehicles leave behind mountains of dead lithium-ion batteries. A new “injection” brings them back to life By You Xiaoying edited by Andrea Thompson Malte Mueller/Getty Images A team of researchers in China has found a way to bring dead lithium-ion batteries… Continue reading AI Found a ‘Magic Potion’ That Can Bring Dead Batteries Back to Life

Black Death Plague That Killed Millions Became Less Fatal because of This Genetic Tweak Reducing the copies of one gene in the bubonic plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, made it less deadly but potentially more transmissible By Rachel Fieldhouse & Nature magazine Scanning electron micrograph of Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic plague, on proventricular spines of a Xenopsylla… Continue reading Black Death Plague That Killed Millions Became Less Fatal because of This Genetic Tweak

Often likened to mermaids in media reports and popular culture, South Korea’s famed Haenyeo (“sea women”) spend much of the day underwater, diving without scuba gear to collect abalone, octopus, kelp and other prized seafood. Admired both culturally and scientifically, they have been plunging into the frigid waters of Jeju Island since as early as… Continue reading These ‘Real-Life Mermaid’ Divers Hold Genetic Clues to Enduring Extreme Environments

Imagine a clock: If the hour hand starts at 10 and four hours pass, the clock will point to 2. But clock arithmetic can be done with any number, not just (as in the case of real-world clocks) the number 12. Boxer, Calegari, Gee and Pilloni only needed to show that their two sets of… Continue reading The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered

Aliens live on Neptune. Ancient pyramids generated electricity. Humans don’t cause climate change. You might imagine the typical believer of these claims to be a card-carrying conspiracy theorist, but they could just as easily be a curious nine-year-old with an iPad. YouTube reliably feeds AI-generated videos containing questionable claims like these to children, often in… Continue reading Kids See a Lot More Misinformation Than We Think

Researchers don’t know precisely how that load is allocated, but over the past few decades, they have clarified what the brain is doing in the background. “Around the mid-’90s we started to realize as a discipline [that] actually there is a whole heap of stuff happening when someone is lying there at rest and they’re… Continue reading How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?