Category: Quantum Stuff

At first, they trickle in: one bird here, a few birds there. Then, at dusk’s cue, a dark smudge materializes on the horizon. Thousands of starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) slowly come into focus, etching flight paths across the winter sky as they stream toward their evening roost in north-central England. Suddenly, the flock dips and twists… Continue reading Order Flocking Out of Chaos – Issue 107: The Edge

India’s relatively mild first wave of COVID last year intrigued scientists and led the country’s leadership to declare what turned out to be a very premature victory over the novel coronavirus. The current surge has been much more deadly. Some researchers and media outlets have pinned the blame on new viral variants, which early studies… Continue reading Why India’s Second COVID Surge Is So Much Worse Than the First

In everyday language, the word “transcendental” connotes something that’s beyond the ordinary, something that is hidden and mysterious, with almost magical or mystical powers. In mathematics, on the other hand, the meaning of the term “transcendental” is more mundane. It simply describes the class of the infinitely many numbers that cannot be solutions of polynomial… Continue reading Where Transcendental Numbers Hide in Everyday Math

In 1993, deep underground at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a few flashes of light inside a bus-size tank of oil kicked off a detective story that is yet to reach its conclusion. The Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) was searching for bursts of radiation created by neutrinos, the lightest and most elusive… Continue reading Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles?

Emily Mullin: This is 60-Second Science. I’m Emily Mullin. In the past 20 years alone, three coronaviruses have caused major disease outbreaks. First came the original SARS virus in 2002. Then, in 2012, MERS was identified. In 2019 SARS-CoV-2 emerged, setting off a global pandemic. Hundreds of other coronaviruses are known to be circulating in bats… Continue reading A ‘Universal’ Coronavirus Vaccine to Prevent the Next Pandemic

David McComas has a favorite “astrosphere,” the environment created by a star’s stellar wind as it buffets the surrounding interstellar medium. It belongs to a star named Mira. In an image from 2006, Mira is heading to the right, at 291,000 miles an hour, five times the speed our sun ambles through its local interstellar… Continue reading The Safety Belt of Our Solar System – Issue 107: The Edge

If you have a few chess sets at home, try the following exercise: Arrange eight queens on a board so that none of them are attacking each other. If you succeed once, can you find a second arrangement? A third? How many are there? This challenge is over 150 years old. It is the earliest… Continue reading Mathematician Answers Chess Problem About Attacking Queens

Amazon.com and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos will fly on the first crewed flight of the New Shepard suborbital vehicle, the billionaire announced on Instagram on Monday (June 7). The flight is scheduled for July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The New Shepard capsule, which operates autonomously and does not need a pilot, will launch… Continue reading Jeff Bezos Will Go to Space on Blue Origin’s First Crewed Flight

The first review article that I have written (with Paola Ayala and Thomas Pichler) has just come out in the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology (CC-BY open access). The purpose of review articles is to summarize – to the best of one’s abilities – the current best understanding of a topic. While previous experimental work by the author… Continue reading My first review article (CC-BY) — Mostly Physics

Neural networks need to “dream” of weird, senseless examples to learn well. Maybe we do, too.Photo Illustration by MDV Edwards / Shutterstock For many of us over the last year and more, our waking experience has, you might say, lost a bit of its variety. We spend more time with the same people, in our… Continue reading Weird Dreams Train Our Brains to Be Better Learners – Facts So Romantic