Category: Quantum Stuff

In just 17 years messenger RNA therapies have gone from proof of concept to global salvation. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for COVID-19 have been given to hundreds of millions of people, saving countless lives. In 2005 Katalin Karikó and I created a way to make mRNA molecules that would not cause dangerous inflammation when… Continue reading Messenger RNA Therapies Are Finally Fulfilling Their Promise

The prints are also helping us to distinguish different types of substructures. For instance, if you’re looking at a filament in two spatial dimensions, it might actually be a two-dimensional sheet that you’re just looking at on its side. And that’s hard to make out in a flat picture — or even a computer simulation.… Continue reading The Astrophysicist Who Sculpts Stars Before They Are Born

When Lee Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford, explained to his students what his term “fundamental attribution error” meant, he loved to quote George Carlin. “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” The late comedian perfectly captured our tendency… Continue reading Are You a Naïve Realist?

Similarly, 7! + 4 is divisible by 4, 7! + 5 by 5, 7! + 6 by 6, and 7! + 7  by 7, which makes 7! + 2, 7! + 3, 7! + 4, 7! + 5, 7! + 6, 7! + 7 a sequence of six consecutive composite numbers. We have a prime… Continue reading How Can Infinitely Many Primes Be Infinitely Far Apart?

As soon as President Biden unveiled the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on July 11, Massimo Pascale and his team sprang into action. Coordinating over Slack, Pascale, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and 14 collaborators divvied up tasks. The image showed thousands of galaxies in a pinprick-size portion… Continue reading Two Weeks In, the Webb Space Telescope Is Reshaping Astronomy

The Kakeya conjecture sounds like a brain teaser. Place a needle flat on a table. How much area do you need in order to be able to turn it so that it points in all possible directions? The most obvious possible answer is a circle whose diameter is the length of the needle. But this… Continue reading New Number Systems Point Geometry Problem Toward a Real Solution

One of the longest-standing questions in biology is how a living thing that starts as an embryonic blob of uniform cells morphs over time into an organism with diverse tissues, each with its own unique pattern and characteristics. The answer would explain how a leopard gets its spots, a zebra gets its stripes, trees get… Continue reading Embryo Cells Set Patterns for Growth by Pushing and Pulling

Conserved physical quantities should not vary, or appear to do so, based on how we choose to label things. That was the situation that Chen, Wang, Wang, and Yau hoped to rectify. Starting with their 2015 definition of quasilocal angular momentum, they computed the angular momentum contained within a region of finite radius. Then they… Continue reading Mass and Angular Momentum, Left Ambiguous by Einstein, Get Defined

In November 2020, the GOP tweeted a C-SPAN clip of Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell saying, “President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it.” It was retweeted over 22,000 times and still hasn’t been deleted. Powell’s claim, of course, was not true. Biden officially won the election. Currently the Select Committee… Continue reading Don’t Give Up on Facts

How can anyone speak with certainty about infinity? What can we really know about the mysterious prime numbers without knowing all of them? Just as scientists need data to assess their hypotheses, mathematicians need evidence to prove or disprove conjectures. But what counts as evidence in the intangible realm of number theory? In this episode,… Continue reading How Do Mathematicians Know Their Proofs Are Correct?