Category: Quantum Stuff

We discovered that the cell has a beautiful buoyancy engine. It inflates like a hot air balloon and is a lot like a desalination plant. Aquaporins, [proteins that form pores in cell membranes], bring in fresh water that has a lower density, so it can suddenly skyrocket up 250 to 300 meters. It produces proteins… Continue reading How Paradoxical Questions and Simple Wonder Lead to Great Science

Late last week the Trump Administration released its detailed budget request for fiscal year 2026 —a request that, if enacted, would be the equivalent of carpet-bombing the national scientific enterprise. “This is a profound, generational threat to scientific leadership in the United States,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a… Continue reading This Budget Plan Would Devastate U.S. Space Science

February 5, 2025 3 min read Trump Administration Shutters Climate Health Office A climate office at the Department of Health and Human Services has been shuttered, and its staff was placed on administrative leave By Ariel Wittenberg & E&E News An elderly man faints in front of the Supreme Court in June 2024 as temperatures… Continue reading Trump Administration Shutters Climate Health Office

For decades, string theory has been hailed as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. Yet despite its mathematical elegance, the theory still lacks empirical evidence. One of its most intriguing, yet vexing, implications is that if all matter and forces are composed of vibrations of tiny strands, then this allows… Continue reading Will We Ever Prove String Theory?

This loss is a fundamental aspect of how computers operate. For example, when a computer adds two numbers together, it returns a single number for the total: 2 + 2 = 4. There’s a loss of information as you go from two numbers to one. You could have added 2 and 2, or you could… Continue reading How Can AI Researchers Save Energy? By Going Backward.

A strain of bird flu never seen before in the United States has been detected among poultry at a California farm. The virus, called highly pathogenic H5N9, is a type of avian influenza, otherwise known as “bird flu.” This is not the same type of bird flu that’s already been spreading on dairy cow and… Continue reading A Second Type of Bird Flu is Circulating in U.S. Ducks—What to Know

Coulson, who was a graduate student with Staples and Guglielmo at the time, led a study on the yellow-rumped warbler, a songbird that migrates between Canada, where it nests, and its wintering grounds in the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean. First, during the birds’ fall migration, they captured the southbound songbirds and brought them… Continue reading ‘Turbocharged’ Mitochondria Power Birds’ Epic Migratory Journeys

One of the most important classes goes by the humble name “P.” Roughly speaking, it encompasses all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time. An analogous complexity class for space is dubbed “PSPACE.” The relationship between these two classes is one of the central questions of complexity theory. Every problem in… Continue reading For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time

February 6, 2025 5 min read Why Elon Musk’s ‘Fork in the Road’ Is Really a Dead End Elon Musk’s Fork in the Road isn’t just a sculpture—it’s a monument to the tech world’s obsession with civilizational survival, which has its roots in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence By Rebecca Charbonneau Unlike the Sistine Chapel–esque… Continue reading Here’s Why Elon Musk’s ‘Fork in the Road’ Is Really a Dead End

February 5, 2025 4 min read To Find Life on Mars, Make Microbes Wiggle Could tiny swimming microbes help us unlock the mysteries of extraterrestrial life? By Gayoung Lee edited by Lee Billings A color-enhanced microscopic view of Bacillus subtilis bacteria, rod-shaped extremophile microbes commonly found in soil and in the guts of cows and… Continue reading To Find Life on Mars, Make Microbes Wiggle