Category: Quantum Stuff

Human-induced climate change may seem a purely modern phenomenon. Even in ancient Greece, however, people understood that human activities can change climate. Later the early United States was a lab for observing this as its settlers altered nature. By 1800 it was known that the mass clearing of forests raised temperatures in the Eastern U.S.… Continue reading If Only 19th-Century America Had Listened to a Woman Scientist – Issue 100: Outsiders

In 2013, a masters student in physics named Paul Erker went combing through textbooks and papers looking for an explanation of what a clock is. “Time is what a clock measures,” Albert Einstein famously quipped; Erker hoped a deeper understanding of clocks might inspire new insights about the nature of time. But he found that… Continue reading The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks

The science you can come across today can often appear to be full of contradictory claims. One study tells you red wine is good for your heart; another tells you it is not. Over the past year, COVID-19 research has offered conflicting reports about the overall effectiveness of wearing a mask. As scientists debate what… Continue reading How to Make Sense of Contradictory Science Papers – Issue 100: Outsiders

Christopher Intagliata: We humans often navigate using road signs and GPS. Elephants, though?  Connie Allen, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter in the U.K., says they navigate over long distances using their incredible memories. (An elephant never forgets, right?)  Connie Allen: But it’s also been suggested here and there that maybe olfaction and sense… Continue reading Elephants May Use Urine to Navigate

Imagine the human genome as a string stretching out for the length of a football field, with all the genes that encode proteins clustered at the end near your feet. Take two big steps forward; all the protein information is now behind you. The human genome has three billion base pairs in its DNA, but… Continue reading The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’

Here’s a game Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented in 1948. He was trying to model the English language as a random process. Go to your bookshelf, pick up a random book, open it and point to a random spot on the page, and mark the first two letters you see. Say they’re… Continue reading A Random Walk through the English Language

Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the two. As Alan Turing put it in 1952: “We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.” In other words, the medium doesn’t matter,… Continue reading How Computationally Complex Is a Single Neuron?

Venus scientists have long complained that the planet wasn’t getting its due in robotic investigators. But those days are over: space agencies have announced three new missions to Earth’s mysterious twin in just over a week. On June 2, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency would pursue two new Venus missions dubbed DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, aiming… Continue reading Venus Wins Stunning Third New Mission, This Time from Europe

So far no one has come up with any clear account of how a coronavirus escaped biosafety level 4 barriers. Photograph by MihasLi / Shutterstock Disasters evoke a search for who to blame. Mishandled disasters make that search vital for anyone whose actions or inactions may have amplified the catastrophe’s damage. As the official United… Continue reading The “Lab Leak”: It’s Not Enough to Say Accidents Happen – Facts So Romantic