Category: Quantum Stuff

How Much Ultraprocessed Food Do You Eat? Blood and Urine Record It A new study suggests blood and urine samples could provide an objective measure of diets and help unravel their connections to disease By Smriti Mallapaty & Nature magazine Diets rich in industrially manufactured food have been associated with several health conditions. Molecules in… Continue reading How Much Ultraprocessed Food Do You Eat? Blood and Urine Record It

CLIMATEWIRE | Public officials have started pleading with the Trump administration for help in recovering from deadly disasters as President Donald Trump triggers frustration in states struck by tornadoes, floods and storms by taking no action on requests for aid. Trump has left states, counties and tribes in limbo as he delays making decisions on… Continue reading Disaster-Struck States Waiting for Weeks for Trump’s Sign-Off on FEMA Aid

But in some ways, the proof was a bit unsatisfying. Jitomirskaya and Avila had used a method that only applied to certain irrational values of alpha. By combining it with an intermediate proof that came before it, they could say the problem was solved. But this combined proof wasn’t elegant. It was a patchwork quilt,… Continue reading ‘Ten Martini’ Proof Uses Number Theory to Explain Quantum Fractals

Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, by Carl Zimmer, charts the history of the field of aerobiology: the science of airborne microorganisms. In this episode, we discover the story of two lost pioneers of the 1930s: physician and self-taught epidemiologist Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, sanitary engineer William Firth Wells. Together,… Continue reading A Public Health Researcher and Her Engineer Husband Found How Diseases Can Spread through Air Decades before the COVID Pandemic

During a briefing from the Oval Office this week, President Donald Trump revealed his administration’s plan for “Golden Dome”—an ambitious high-tech system meant to shield the U.S. from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile attacks launched by foreign adversaries. Flanked by senior officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the project’s newly selected leader, Gen.… Continue reading Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ Probably Can’t Work, According to Science

Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has… Continue reading The Sudden Surges That Forge Evolutionary Trees

It’s surprising because they would be the only organisms on Earth to do this. There are many metabolic processes that go in the forward direction and the reverse direction. That is something that life uses quite a bit just to be more efficient with our enzymes. But the idea that your respiration — what you… Continue reading The Pursuit of Life Where It Seems Unimaginable

Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries. In a wide-ranging conversation with co-host Janna Levin, Prum traces the deep evolutionary origins of feathers, which he argues first… Continue reading Do Beautiful Birds Have an Evolutionary Advantage?

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. There are a few animals that pretty much everyone likes: fluffy pandas, cute kittens and regal tigers. Dolphins would probably make the list for most folks; they’re intelligent, playful and have that permanent smile on their face. Watching them darting around in the water kind… Continue reading An AI-Assisted Chat with Dolphins