Total Solar Eclipses Are Cosmic Coincidences That Won’t Last Forever Earthlings are very lucky to see the spectacle of a total solar eclipse By Meghan Bartels Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that will be visible from parts of the U.S., Mexico and… Continue reading Total Solar Eclipses Are Cosmic Coincidences That Won’t Last Forever
Category: Quantum Stuff
Medicaid Expansion Alone Won’t Stop the Opioid Overdose Crisis
Medicaid Expansion Alone Isn’t Enough to Stop the Opioid Overdose Crisis Expanding the state and federal insurance program helps prevent overdoses. But that only happens with enough treatment, and legal reform, to make it work By Hannah L. F. Cooper, Courtney R. Yarbrough, Umedjon Ibragimov, Janet Cummings & Danielle Haley People are seen outside a… Continue reading Medicaid Expansion Alone Won’t Stop the Opioid Overdose Crisis
Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang
About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the… Continue reading Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang
Cryptographers Discover a New Foundation for Quantum Secrecy
Ma began brainstorming how best to approach that question, together with Alex Lombardi, a cryptographer at Princeton University, and John Wright, a quantum computing researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “It was just so fascinating and so mind-bending that I was immediately hooked,” Wright said. After thinking about the question for a while and… Continue reading Cryptographers Discover a New Foundation for Quantum Secrecy
The Simplest Math Problem Could Be Unsolvable
At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo Kakutani told him that during the cold war, “for about a month everybody at Yale [University] worked on it, with no result. A similar phenomenon happened… Continue reading The Simplest Math Problem Could Be Unsolvable
How to Make Hybrid Work a Success, according to Science
Certain aspects of scientific life do not lend themselves to working from home. Archaeologist Adrià Breu, who studies neolithic pottery at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, can’t dig for artefacts in his kitchen, and Claudia Sala’s experiments in molecular microbiology at the Toscana Life Sciences Foundation in Siena, Italy, oblige her to commute to… Continue reading How to Make Hybrid Work a Success, according to Science
How Japan’s ‘Moon Sniper’ Mission Hit Its Mark
When Japan’s solar-powered SLIM spacecraft made a lopsided-but-successful touchdown on the moon in mid-January, most news coverage focused on the feat as a historic first for the nation—only the fifth after the U.S., the former Soviet Union, China and India to ever achieve a soft lunar landing. But the most historic aspect of SLIM—which stands… Continue reading How Japan’s ‘Moon Sniper’ Mission Hit Its Mark
Most Life on Earth is Dormant, After Pulling an ‘Emergency Brake’
Researchers recently reported the discovery of a natural protein, named Balon, that can bring a cell’s production of new proteins to a screeching halt. Balon was found in bacteria that hibernate in Arctic permafrost, but it also seems to be made by many other organisms and may be an overlooked mechanism for dormancy throughout the… Continue reading Most Life on Earth is Dormant, After Pulling an ‘Emergency Brake’
Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health?
During traumatic periods and their aftermath, our brains can fall into habitual ways of thinking that may be helpful in the short run but become maladaptive years later. For the brain to readjust to new situations later in life, it needs to be restored to the malleable state it was in when the habits first… Continue reading Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health?
Will Better Superconductors Transform the World?
If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would consider normal, they would be world-changing. They could dramatically amplify power grids, levitate high-speed trains and enable more affordable medical technologies. For more than a century, physicists have tinkered with different compounds and environmental… Continue reading Will Better Superconductors Transform the World?