Category: Quantum Stuff

Balance-scale puzzles abound in recreational mathematics. The essential element is the humble two-pan balance scale — a staple of commerce over the millennia that’s still found in bustling rural bazaars in the developing world. The simplest versions consist of a metal beam from which hang two pans at equal distances from the central support or… Continue reading Puzzles on Weighing Truth With a Balance Scale

Explore After experimenting on a hen, his dog, his goldfish, and himself, dentist William Morton was ready. On Oct. 16, 1846, he hurried to the Massachusetts General Hospital surgical theater for what would be the first successful public test of a general anesthetic. His concoction of sulfuric ether and oil from an orange (just for… Continue reading Under Anesthesia, Where Do Our Minds Go?

Explore What’s enchanting about our oceans is how unexplored they still are, teeming with unknown species. Scientists add, on average, around 2,000 new entries to the World Register of Marine Species every year. It can be profoundly moving to fathom the scale of sea life and the strange forms it can take. The sobering reality… Continue reading Automatic for the Oceans

In the late 19th century, Florence Nightingale revolutionized hospital design in what became known as Nightingale wards. The signature innovation of these wards was large windows that allowed cross-ventilation and abundant natural light. Nightingale believed that the light and air quality in a hospital’s environment play an important role in speeding patient recovery. In the… Continue reading What Florence Nightingale Can Teach Us about Architecture and Health

The Stanford team conducted an extensive analysis of the proteins in killifish at various stages of youth and maturity. In the aging killifish, they discovered protein aggregates in all the tissues that they looked at: not only the brain but also the heart, gut, liver, muscle, skin and testis. More than half of the aggregating… Continue reading Protein Blobs Linked to Alzheimer’s Affect Aging in All Cells

Scientists don’t really agree on a definition for life. We may recognize life instinctively most of the time, but any time we try to nail it down with set criteria, some stubborn counterexample spoils the effort. Still, can we really search for life on other worlds, or understand the earliest stages of life on this… Continue reading What Is Life? | Quanta Magazine

In geometry and the closely related field of topology, adding a spatial dimension can often have wondrous effects: Previously distinct objects become indistinguishable. But a new proof finds there are some objects whose differences are so stark, they can’t be effaced with a little more space. The work, posted at the end of May, solves… Continue reading Special Surfaces Remain Distinct in Four Dimensions

If you went back to that class today, do you think that the teachings would be very different? Oh yeah, I hope so. We’ve learned so much since then. When I took that class, the innate immune system wasn’t really understood well. It was only in 1997 that Ruslan Medzhitov, who is now my husband,… Continue reading An Immunologist Fights Covid with Tweets and a Nasal Spray

Imagine 100 dots scattered in front of you. In a haphazard variation on connect-the-dots, start drawing lines between the points. How many lines can you draw without producing a triangle? A square? An 11-pointed star? These types of problems have a long history in mathematics. In a paper posted on April 26, Oliver Janzer and… Continue reading New Proof Shows When Structure Must Emerge in Graphs