Category: Quantum Stuff

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

By the time he was 17, Mark Braverman had lived in three countries and spoke as many languages. But though he doesn’t have a hometown, he’s quick to call theoretical computer science his home. “Theoretical computer science is whatever you want it to be,” he said in his airy office at Princeton University, sitting between… Continue reading Mark Braverman Wins the IMU Abacus Medal

That’s not to say the work is finished. “It’s much less real than the real world, even the best simulator,” said Daniel Yamins, a computer scientist at Stanford University. With colleagues at MIT and IBM, Yamins co-developed ThreeDWorld, which puts a strong focus on mimicking real-life physics in virtual worlds — things like how liquids… Continue reading AI Makes Strides in Virtual Worlds More Like Our Own

Explore With their daughter in the hospital suffering from kidney failure, Jonathan Bate and his wife Paula Byrne waited. “In that darkest moment, when she was struggling to survive, it was very hard to think of anything other than the prospect of losing her,” Bate says today. Bate and Byrne, both renowned literary scholars and… Continue reading Feeling Stressed? Read a Poem

Chelsea Cook grew to love the low hum of the honeybees she studied as a graduate student in Boulder, Colorado. Their characteristic buzz, she learned, was audible cooperation, the result of worker bees fanning their wings at the colony’s entrance to circulate the air and cool the hive. Cook often watched as the insects responded… Continue reading How Are the Bees?

In 2020 experts at the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and other public health agencies watched a presentation that many thought was impractical at the time. Several companies proposed to regularly sample wastewater from sewers and treatment plants and run tests to detect SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19. People excrete the virus… Continue reading Wastewater Monitoring Offers Powerful Tool for Tracking COVID and Other Diseases