Category: Quantum Stuff

Explore A gulp of air, a kick of flippers, and the elephant seal dives. Sunlight slants through the Southern Ocean’s melting roof of sea-ice, its solid dome shattered by the arrival of Antarctic summer. The seal—Mirounga, we’ll call her—descends many times each day to snatch fish and squid in her toothy jaws; she spends 90… Continue reading What Oceanographers Can Learn From Their Animal Colleagues

Inside, the office is spare, pragmatic: just a computer, printer, chalkboard, papers and books, with few personal effects. The place where the magic happens seems not so much a physical location in space-time as a higher-dimensional world of abstractions in Viazovska’s mind. Across the small table in her office, the world’s preeminent sphere-packing number theorist… Continue reading Ukrainian Mathematician Maryna Viazovska Wins Fields Medal

One question for Lee McIntyre, research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. McIntyre is the author of The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience, and How to Talk to a Science Denier. How do we get people who believe in pseudoscience to trust science? We… Continue reading How Do We Get People Who Believe in Pseudoscience to Trust Science?

Ever since it was approved in 2000 as an abortion pill, mifepristone has been regulated as if it were a dangerous substance. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration required doctors to be specially certified to prescribe it. Patients had to sign an agreement confirming that they had been counseled on its risks. Most onerously, the… Continue reading Abortion Pills Are Very Safe and Effective, yet Government Rules Still Hinder Access

As U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban immediately rushed in, and it recently took over the country’s major cities in just a few days. The end of the two-decade American occupation has not only produced a fraught political situation; it has also created an environmental one. Some of the military bases the U.S. handed… Continue reading U.S. Forces Are Leaving a Toxic Environmental Legacy in Afghanistan

Huh discovered that this kind of mathematics could give him what poetry could not: the ability to search for beauty outside himself, to try to grasp something external, objective and true, in a way that opened him up more than writing ever had. “You don’t think about your small self,” he said. “There’s no place… Continue reading June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Shortly after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, both governments said that the Russian military had taken over the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. In a tweet, the Ukrainian Ministry of… Continue reading Russian Capture of Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Threatens Future Research

Mathematicians want to understand how the system behaves below, at and above that critical point. But until around 2008, percolation theory was mostly limited to pinning down the details of the simplest model of percolation, called Bernoulli percolation. It wasn’t until Duminil-Copin made it his mission to extend that understanding to other percolation models that… Continue reading Hugo Duminil-Copin Wins the Fields Medal

In 2013, one of the best — but also one of the worst — things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the discipline’s oldest and most central problems, about the spacing of prime numbers. It was an achievement that ordinarily would have… Continue reading Number Theorist James Maynard Wins the Fields Medal