Category: Quantum Stuff

Scientists don’t really agree on a definition for life. We may recognize life instinctively most of the time, but any time we try to nail it down with set criteria, some stubborn counterexample spoils the effort. Still, can we really search for life on other worlds, or understand the earliest stages of life on this… Continue reading What Is Life? | Quanta Magazine

In geometry and the closely related field of topology, adding a spatial dimension can often have wondrous effects: Previously distinct objects become indistinguishable. But a new proof finds there are some objects whose differences are so stark, they can’t be effaced with a little more space. The work, posted at the end of May, solves… Continue reading Special Surfaces Remain Distinct in Four Dimensions

If you went back to that class today, do you think that the teachings would be very different? Oh yeah, I hope so. We’ve learned so much since then. When I took that class, the innate immune system wasn’t really understood well. It was only in 1997 that Ruslan Medzhitov, who is now my husband,… Continue reading An Immunologist Fights Covid with Tweets and a Nasal Spray

Imagine 100 dots scattered in front of you. In a haphazard variation on connect-the-dots, start drawing lines between the points. How many lines can you draw without producing a triangle? A square? An 11-pointed star? These types of problems have a long history in mathematics. In a paper posted on April 26, Oliver Janzer and… Continue reading New Proof Shows When Structure Must Emerge in Graphs

The precursors of phoenixin and nesfatin are not used directly as neuropeptides by nervous systems; instead, these long peptides are chemical precursors that get chopped up and processed into smaller molecules that become the functional, mature neuropeptides. Their hidden identity may be why they were not identified as promising leads earlier. A further search of… Continue reading Brain-Signal Proteins Evolved Before Animals Did

Explore Around 450 B.C., Anaxagoras of Clazomenae had some time to think. The Greek mathematician was in prison for claiming the sun was not a god, but rather an incandescent rock as big as the Peloponnese peninsula. A philosopher who believed that “reason rules the world,” he used his incarceration to grapple with a now-famous… Continue reading An Ancient Geometry Problem Falls to New Mathematical Techniques

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. You’re probably familiar with the concept of evolution. Living things evolve by accumulating genetic changes, which are then weeded out or preserved through a process of natural selection. Turns out the same thing happens in music. And by using the same software that’s used to… Continue reading Researchers Analyzed Folk Music like It Was Mutating DNA: They Found Amazing Parallels between Life and Art

Over the decades, mathematicians made partial progress toward a proof. They showed, for instance, that the conjecture was true for particular types of primitive sets. Still, “it felt like we weren’t really all that close to it before Jared started working on it,” said Greg Martin, a mathematician at the University of British Columbia who… Continue reading Graduate Student’s Side Project Proves Prime Number Conjecture

From the window of a passenger plane flying over the Amazon, the view is breathtaking. “It’s just miles across of river and river islands,” said Lukas Musher, a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences. The massive rivers below branch into a dense, treelike network that has continuously rearranged itself over hundreds of… Continue reading Reshuffled Rivers Bolster the Amazon’s Hyper-Biodiversity