Category: Quantum Stuff

Achieving the right balance between the weight of the loading zone and the weight of the rest of the tetrahedron is easy in the abstract realm of mathematics — you can define the weight distribution without a care for whether it’s physically possible. You might, for instance, let parts of the shape weigh nothing at all,… Continue reading A New Pyramid-Like Shape Always Lands the Same Side Up

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. How are you doing today, listeners? Would you say you’re flourishing? I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t—unless you have a particularly florid vocabulary. But researchers are increasingly focused on the idea of “human flourishing,” a multifaceted measurement that aims to take a holistic look at our… Continue reading Are You Flourishing? This Global Study Has Surprising Takeaways

Why Do We Launch Space Telescopes? Telescopes in space give us a view we literally cannot get from the ground By Phil Plait edited by Lee Billings Astronauts Steven Smith and John Grunsfeld, appear as small figures in this wide-angle photograph from December 1999, taken during a spacewalk to service the Hubble Space Telescope. On… Continue reading Why Do We Launch Space Telescopes?

Outside every National Weather Service (NWS) office around the U.S. stands what looks like an enormous white soccer ball, perched atop metal scaffolding several stories high. These somewhat plain spheres look as ho-hum as a town water tower, but tucked inside each is one of modern meteorology’s most revolutionary and lifesaving tools: Doppler radar. The… Continue reading Why Potential Weather Radar Outages Have Meteorologists Worried

June 1 marks the official start of the hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean—and once again, the season looks like it will be busy. Though it is impossible to tell this far in advance exactly when storms will form and where they might hit, the presence of hurricane-friendly environmental conditions this season—along with the federal… Continue reading Hurricane Season Is Here—This Is What Experts Are Most Worried About

Born in the 18th century when Leonhard Euler solved the puzzle of the seven bridges of Königsberg, graph theory has become a foundational tool in mathematics. It studies relationships through nodes (vertices) and the links (edges) that connect them, transforming the complexity of systems — from friendship networks to airline routes — into elegant abstractions… Continue reading How Does Graph Theory Shape Our World?

In the animal kingdom, there is incredible variation in visual perception. What an animal sees depends on the structure of its retina and its neural visual processing system. Most insects can see ultraviolet, blue and green light, but there is wide variety among arthropods; mantis shrimp eyes have up to 12 different channels of color,… Continue reading When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color?

SpaceX’s Starbase Is Officially a City. Some Neighbors Aren’t Thrilled Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site turned company town in South Texas, faces local opposition from residents outside the city limits By Paola Rosa-Aquino edited by Lee Billings SpaceX rockets stand near the end of a neighborhood street in the company’s Starbase launch complex in this photograph… Continue reading Can SpaceX’s New City, Starbase, Learn to Get Along with Its Neighbors?

We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems that can beat us in chess, analyze huge reams of text and compose sonnets. This has been one of the great surprises of the modern era: physical tasks that are easy for humans turn out to be… Continue reading Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity

The shards flow through a network of pipes into a fragment separator that sorts them into isotopes of interest. These eventually end up at the SuN, a cylindrical detector 16 inches wide. With metal spokes extending out in all directions, “it kind of looks like the sun, which is fun,” said Ellie Ronning, an MSU… Continue reading Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms