Category: Quantum Stuff

In the early 1980s, then real estate developer Donald Trump famously tried to evict a group of New York City residents from a rent-controlled building that he wanted to replace with a luxury high-rise. The tenants eventually beat back the plan. Today President Trump is having more luck with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies… Continue reading Trump Administration Shutters New York City–Based NASA Institute

The advantage of Rogers’ method was that you didn’t have to start with a particularly efficient lattice to get an efficient sphere packing. You just had to choose the right ellipsoid. But this introduced a new complication. Unlike a sphere, which is completely defined by a single number — its radius — an ellipsoid is… Continue reading New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source

These Climbers Summited Mount Everest in Record Time. Did Inhaling Xenon Help? British climbers recently reached the top of Mount Everest in record time. They inhaled xenon gas before the trip. But was that the decisive factor? By Stephanie Pappas edited by Jeanna Bryner Part of the Himalayan mountains, Mount Everest is considered the highest… Continue reading These Climbers Summited Mount Everest in Record Time. Did Inhaling Xenon Help?

Randomness is a source of power. From the coin toss that decides which team gets the ball to the random keys that secure online interactions, randomness lets us make choices that are fair and impossible to predict. But in many computing applications, suitable randomness can be hard to generate. So instead, programmers often rely on… Continue reading Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies

Climate models have changed the way we view the world. While effective, these models are imperfect, and scientists are constantly looking at ways to improve their accuracy and predictability. MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir has spent decades developing complex models to understand how climate change affects vulnerable regions like the Nile Basin and Singapore. In this… Continue reading How Can Regional Models Advance Climate Science?

On June 23, 2025, Tony Tyson joined a presentation in Washington, D.C., to unveil an image almost 30 years in the making: 10 million galaxies poised on an inky black backdrop. To appreciate each galaxy in detail, you’d have to stretch the picture across 400 TVs. It’s the first portrait of the cosmos delivered by… Continue reading The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus

“What the cell is trying to do is make decisions about whether to live or die based on how damaged the DNA is. If DNA is too damaged, there will be mutations that are inherited,” said Rachel Green, an RNA biologist at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored the Cell study. “But amazingly, it’s the RNA… Continue reading RNA Is the Cell’s Emergency Alert System

CLIMATEWIRE | The oil and gas industry is pushing the Trump administration to kill a proposed rule that would protect workers from extreme heat, arguing that it jeopardizes the president’s vision of achieving “energy dominance.” The opposition comes as people who work in U.S. oil and gas fields face increasingly dangerous conditions as global temperatures… Continue reading Heat Is Killing Oil Workers. The Industry Is Trying to Kill a Rule That Would Protect Them

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