Category: Quantum Stuff

Even if you’ve never seen the original Matrix movie, you probably know the central premise: Our hero, a computer programmer named Neo, discovers that reality is not as it seems. What he understood to be his world was a simulation; he eventually awakes in a liquid-filled pod, where his body had been languishing. That, of… Continue reading The Simulated World According to David Chalmers

Irene Valenzuela, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, agreed. “One of the questions is if string theory is the unique theory of quantum gravity or not,” she said. “This goes along the lines that string theory is unique.” Other commentators saw that as too bold a… Continue reading In a Numerical Coincidence, Some See Evidence for String Theory

Plant-based meat alternatives are making the rounds from food blogs to five-star restaurants—and soon they may appear on menus for some decidedly different diners. A new study published in Communications Biology shows how to trick mosquitoes into eating beet juice “blood” laced with poison. Mosquito-borne diseases kill more than 700,000 people every year, with malaria… Continue reading New Bait Uses Mosquitoes’ Love of Malaria Parasite to Bite Them Back

And then there were two—maybe. Astronomers say they have found a second plausible candidate for a moon beyond our solar system, an exomoon, orbiting a world nearly 6,000 light-years from Earth.Called Kepler-1708 b-i, the moon appears to be a gas-dominated object, slightly smaller than Neptune, orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet around a sunlike star—an unusual but… Continue reading Astronomers Have Found Another Possible ‘Exomoon’ beyond Our Solar System

Extreme heat threatens to effect all of California in coming years, prompting state officials to outline life-saving measures in an adaptation report released this week. Average annual temperatures have already jumped in California by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit, and it has exceeded 2 F in some areas, according to the analysis by the California… Continue reading California Presents Plan to Prevent Extreme Heat Deaths

For sheer brilliance, it was hard to beat John von Neumann. An architect of the modern computer and inventor of game theory, von Neumann was legendary, above all, for his lightning-fast mental calculations. The story goes that one day somebody challenged him with a puzzle. Two bicyclists start at opposite ends of a road 20… Continue reading How Infinite Series Reveal the Unity of Mathematics

Intuition tells mathematicians that adding 2 to a number should completely change its multiplicative structure — meaning there should be no correlation between whether a number is prime (a multiplicative property) and whether the number two units away is prime (an additive property). Number theorists have found no evidence to suggest that such a correlation… Continue reading Mathematicians Outwit Hidden Number Conspiracy

Fluids can be roughly divided into two categories: regular ones and weird ones. Regular ones, like water and alcohol, act more or less as expected when pumped through pipes or stirred with a spoon. Lurking among the weird ones — which include substances such as paint, honey, mucus, blood, ketchup and oobleck — are a… Continue reading An Injection of Chaos Solves Decades-Old Fluid Mystery

A connection between the human herpesvirus Epstein-Barr and multiple sclerosis (MS) has long been suspected but has been difficult to prove. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is the primary cause of mononucleosis and is so common that 95 percent of adults carry it. Unlike Epstein-Barr, MS, a devastating demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, is relatively… Continue reading Epstein-Barr Virus Found to Trigger Multiple Sclerosis

As Earth heats up from the burning of fossil fuels, the climate conditions that species have adapted to are increasingly shifting away from their historical ranges. But while birds and other animals can often fly, walk or swim to follow their preferred environment, plants are quite literally rooted to the ground. They require outside forces… Continue reading Plants are Stuck as Seed-Eating Animals Decline