In math, as in life, small choices can have big consequences. This is especially true in graph theory, a field that studies networks of objects and the connections between them. Here’s a little puzzle to help you see why. Given six dots, your goal is to connect them to each other with line segments so… Continue reading Math That Lets You Think Locally but Act Globally
Category: Quantum Stuff
New Proof Shows That ‘Expander’ Graphs Synchronize
Melody and Silence In the early 1990s, together with his student Shinya Watanabe, Strogatz showed that Kuramoto’s solution was not only possible, but all but inevitable, even for a finite number of oscillators. In 2011, Richard Taylor of the Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization chipped away at Kuramoto’s requirement that the graph be complete. He… Continue reading New Proof Shows That ‘Expander’ Graphs Synchronize
A New Therapy for Multiple Personality Disorder Helps a Woman with 12 Selves
When Ella time traveled in my office for the first time, I did not realize what was happening right away. She was sitting comfortably in a chair, her hands folded, her back straight and her feet flat on the floor. There was no dramatic change, no shuddering or twitching. But then I saw it: a… Continue reading A New Therapy for Multiple Personality Disorder Helps a Woman with 12 Selves
How (Nearly) Nothing Might Solve Cosmology’s Biggest Questions
“The Hubble tension has lasted a decade so far because it is a hard problem,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who uses supernovas to estimate the Hubble constant. “The obvious issues have been checked and the data has improved, so the dilemma deepens.” Now, the hope is that studying nearly nothing… Continue reading How (Nearly) Nothing Might Solve Cosmology’s Biggest Questions
Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis
Their findings are “the most detailed example to date” of what happens to the brain of an insect undergoing metamorphosis, said Deniz Erezyilmaz, a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Oxford’s Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior who used to work in Truman’s lab but wasn’t involved in this work. The results may apply… Continue reading Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis
Does Nothingness Exist? | Quanta Magazine
Aristotle argued almost 2,400 years ago that a perfect vacuum could never exist. Today, the concept of nothingness figures at least implicitly into almost every theory of modern physics. In this episode closing out season 2 of “The Joy of Why,” the theoretical physicist Isabel Garcia Garcia of New York University and the Institute for… Continue reading Does Nothingness Exist? | Quanta Magazine
The Physicist Who Bets That Gravity Can’t Be Quantized
Quanta Magazine > 0; if (typeof predicate !== ‘function’) { throw new TypeError(‘predicate must be a function’); } var thisArg = arguments[1]; var k = 0; while (k We care about your data, and we’d like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.Agree… Continue reading The Physicist Who Bets That Gravity Can’t Be Quantized
Climate Change Has Made California’s Wildfires Five Times Bigger
CLIMATEWIRE | The amount of land scorched by wildfires in California has been on the rise for decades, and human-caused climate change is almost entirely to blame. A new study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that California’s summertime burned area has increased fivefold since 1971. And it won’t stop there —… Continue reading Climate Change Has Made California’s Wildfires Five Times Bigger
New Proof Threads the Needle on a Sticky Geometry Problem
Here’s one way to think about the Minkowski dimension: Take your set and cover it with tiny balls that each have a diameter of one-millionth of your preferred unit. If your set is a line segment of length 1, you’ll need at least 1 million balls to cover it. If your set is a square… Continue reading New Proof Threads the Needle on a Sticky Geometry Problem
Draconian Laws Deter Pregnant Women from Treating Drug Abuse
Neonatologist Stephen W. Patrick of Vanderbilt University Medical Center recalls one patient in particular. She was seeking care for an opioid use disorder (OUD) at the treatment facility that he runs in Nashville, Tenn. The patient came in frantic after an exchange at her first prenatal visit. The sonographer who conducted her ultrasound, she recounted,… Continue reading Draconian Laws Deter Pregnant Women from Treating Drug Abuse