Category: Quantum Stuff

Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better

Nine patients did simple calculations in their heads while researchers recorded their brain activity. Sure enough, in the data, Nieder and Mormann saw neurons firing for their preferred numbers — the first time number neurons had been identified in the human brain. They published their findings in Neuron in 2018. Neuroscientists are of course driven… Continue reading Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better

A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers

If this hypothesis is correct, that would mean that when you’re sieving up to 1 trillion, you can cross off multiples of 2, then 3, then 5, and keep going until the inclusion/exclusion sum starts to involve divisors over about 1 million — beyond that point, you can’t calculate the terms in your sum. In… Continue reading A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers

A Brief History of Tricky Mathematical Tiling

Quanta Magazine > 0; if (typeof predicate !== ‘function’) { throw new TypeError(‘predicate must be a function’); } var thisArg = arguments[1]; var k = 0; while (k We care about your data, and we’d like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.Agree… Continue reading A Brief History of Tricky Mathematical Tiling

Here’s Why Salt Water Is Invading the Mississippi and Whether It Will Happen More Often

CLIMATEWIRE | The drought-driven wedge of salt water creeping up the Mississippi River is deepening a mystery about one of the world’s mightiest waterways. How will climate change affect the river? There are relatively few scientific studies on how warming is reshaping the Mississippi, and even fewer on saltwater intrusion from the Gulf of Mexico. The… Continue reading Here’s Why Salt Water Is Invading the Mississippi and Whether It Will Happen More Often

How to Watch the Northern Lights and Other Awesome Auroras

Imagine standing under the starry vault, bundled against the cold, when the sky erupts overhead. Rippling curtains, ribbons and streamers of colors across the rainbow light up the night, shimmering and majestic and all eerily silent. That’s what it’s like to see a vivid auroral display, and being able to witness one for yourself is… Continue reading How to Watch the Northern Lights and Other Awesome Auroras

The AI Boom Could Use a Shocking Amount of Electricity

Every online interaction relies on a scaffolding of information stored in remote servers—and those machines, stacked together in data centers worldwide, require a lot of energy. Around the globe, data centers currently account for about 1 to 1.5 percent of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency. And the world’s still-exploding boom in… Continue reading The AI Boom Could Use a Shocking Amount of Electricity

Icy Oceans Exist on Far-Off Moons. Why Aren’t They Frozen Solid?

They’d based their prediction on the orbital dance of Jupiter’s largest moons. For every four orbits that Io completes, Europa makes two and Ganymede one. This orbital configuration, known as a resonance, causes Io to wobble back and forth, making its orbit elliptical. When Io is closer to Jupiter, the planet’s gravity yanks on it… Continue reading Icy Oceans Exist on Far-Off Moons. Why Aren’t They Frozen Solid?

The Mathematician Who Shaped String Theory

Eugenio Calabi was known to his colleagues as an inventive mathematician — “transformatively original,” as his former student Xiuxiong Chen put it. In 1953, Calabi began to contemplate a class of shapes that nobody had ever envisioned before. Other mathematicians thought their existence was impossible. But a couple of decades later, these same shapes became… Continue reading The Mathematician Who Shaped String Theory