Category: Quantum Stuff

Those Who Don’t Know The evening before Fuchs and I had lunch, he had given the first official physics talk of the conference, a lightning review of QBism and a report on some conjectures in number theory that QBist thinking had helped him make recent progress on. His closing words at the end of the… Continue reading ‘It’s a Mess’: A Brain-Bending Trip to Quantum Theory’s 100th Birthday Party

New Contacts Let You See Infrared Light—Even with Your Eyes Closed Straight out of science fiction, these contact lenses convert infrared light into visible light that humans can see By Elizabeth Gibney & Nature magazine People who tested a new type of designer contact lens could see flashing infrared signals from a light source. Yuqian… Continue reading These Contacts Let You See Infrared Light—Even with Your Eyes Closed

Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final years, Stephen Hawking working with Thomas Hertog proposed a striking idea: The laws of physics were not precisely determined before… Continue reading Why Did The Universe Begin?

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of cryptography. Several years ago, researchers found a radically new approach to encryption that lacks this potential weak spot. The approach… Continue reading Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography

Between climate change, economic anxiety and political turmoil, the world can feel like a scary place, especially for kids. Today’s young people have already been through a deadly global pandemic, they regularly drill to prepare for school shootings, and they must learn to navigate an age of misinformation and danger online. These stressors seem to… Continue reading How to Help Kids Navigate Our Dangerous World—With Science

The Applause for Jaws despite Flaws Fifty years ago the movie Jaws scared beachgoers and demonized sharks. Now, however, the public is evolving a better understanding By Chris Pepin-Neff The titular giant great white shark opens its mouth in a still from the film Jaws (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images… Continue reading The Applause for Jaws despite Flaws

Kristin Kramer woke up early on a Tuesday morning 10 years ago because one of her dogs needed to go out. Then, a couple of odd things happened. When she tried to call her other dog, “I couldn’t speak,” she said. As she walked downstairs to let them into the yard, “I noticed that my… Continue reading Ministrokes Can Be Just as Dangerous for the Brain as Regular Strokes

In 1971, Fan Chung, then in her second year of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, received an assignment. Her thesis adviser, Herbert Wilf, asked her to read the proof of a problem in Ramsey theory, an area of mathematics that explores the inevitable emergence of patterns in networks of vertices and edges called… Continue reading Why the Key to a Mathematical Life is Collaboration

Then, in a process Kukushkin described as a tedious choreography of clockwork pipetting, they exposed the cells to precisely timed bursts of chemicals that imitated bursts of neurotransmitters in the brain. Kukushkin’s team found that the both the nerve and kidney cells could finely differentiate these patterns. A steady three-minute burst activated CRE, making the… Continue reading What Can a Cell Remember?

Cairo followed this advice. In the fall of 2023, her family moved to Davis, 60 miles northeast of Berkeley. There, her older brother enrolled as a freshman at UC Davis, and her parents allowed her to commute to Berkeley on Tuesdays and Thursdays. By the spring, she was going five days a week and taking… Continue reading At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery