Category: Quantum Stuff

When we think about medicine’s war on cancer, treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy spring to mind first. Now there is another potential weapon for defeating tumors: statistics and mathematical models that can optimize the selection, combination or timing of treatment. Building and feeding these models requires accounting for the complexity of the body,… Continue reading How Can Math Help Beat Cancer?

Every year, in latitudes far enough north or south, a huge swath of life on Earth senses that winter is coming. Leaves fall from trees, sparrows fly to the tropics, raccoons grow thick winter coats, and we unpack our sweaters from storage. Now scientists have shown that this ability to anticipate shorter days and colder… Continue reading Even a Single Bacterial Cell Can Sense the Seasons Changing

As more evidence links static to survival, a story is emerging that evolution may fine-tune the capacity to sense or carry charge just like any other trait. “The fact that there’s such a diverse range of species with different ecologies is what makes it so interesting,” said Beth Harris, a graduate student in Robert’s lab.… Continue reading The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology

In 1971, a year after completing his doctorate, Rubin started working for the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. When a government agency asked ETS to analyze a survey with missing data, Rubin proposed an unconventional but surprisingly simple solution: Don’t just impute once. Impute multiple times. Imputing, and Imputing Again Let’s go back… Continue reading When Data Is Missing, Scientists Guess. Then Guess Again.

How do you prove something is true? For mathematicians, the answer is simple: Start with some basic assumptions and proceed, step by step, to the conclusion. QED, proof complete. If there’s a mistake anywhere, an expert who reads the proof carefully should be able to spot it. Otherwise, the proof must be valid. Mathematicians have… Continue reading Computer Scientists Combine Two ‘Beautiful’ Proof Methods

Karl Schwarzschild first stumbled upon black holes in 1916, but for a long time they weren’t really a thing. “Black holes were discovered as a purely geometric object — in a sense, just empty space. Nothing,” said Yuk Ting Albert Law, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University. A mathematical oddity that popped out of Albert… Continue reading The #1 Clue to Quantum Gravity Sits on the Surfaces of Black Holes