Category: Quantum Stuff

After four years of an agenda that favored polluters, a new day is dawning at the Department of the Interior. In March, communities across the country rejoiced in Secretary Deb Haaland’s historic confirmation to lead the biggest and most powerful land management agency in the country. Now, she’s taking the opportunity to pursue real reforms… Continue reading Any Reform of Federal Oil and Gas Leasing Must Include Environmental Justice

But seismology is not omniscient. Seismic waves can detect structures within the mantle, but they cannot reveal every characteristic of those structures. “You can slow down a seismic wave by heating a material up,” said Harriet Lau, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. But a change in the rock’s mineral makeup can achieve… Continue reading A Massive Subterranean ‘Tree’ Is Moving Magma to Earth’s Surface

Instead of reaching for a cup of coffee during a graveyard shift, workers might one day hold an electric-razor-sized device to their necks. After a couple of minutes they would emerge refreshed and awake from this experience, which could come to be known as a “vagus nerve break.” The device, called gammaCore, sends a series… Continue reading Neck-Zapping Gadget Reduced All-Nighter Fatigue in New Study

The emerging picture does more than reconfigure our view of what biomolecules in our cells are up to as they build an organism — what logic they follow to create complex life. It might also help us understand why living things are able to survive at all in the face of an unpredictable environment, and… Continue reading Biologists Rethink the Logic Behind Cells’ Molecular Signals

A concentration of one part per billion is like a pinch of salt in 10 tons of potato chips—and scientists can now find radioactive particles at concentrations millions of times smaller. In the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, researchers describe successfully detecting radioactive uranium and thorium hiding among something like a million billion other atoms.… Continue reading New Radioactivity Measurement Could Boost Precision of Dark Matter Experiments

Imagine two friends hiking in the woods. They grow hungry and decide to split an apple, but half an apple feels meager. Then one of them remembers one of the strangest ideas she’s ever encountered. It’s a mathematical theorem involving infinity that makes it possible, at least in principle, to turn one apple into two.… Continue reading Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

Faced with a threat, the brain has to act fast, its neurons making new connections to learn what might spell the difference between life and death. But in its response, the brain also raises the stakes: As an unsettling recent discovery shows, to express learning and memory genes more quickly, brain cells snap their DNA… Continue reading To Learn More Quickly, Brain Cells Break Their DNA

(The RIO Journal’s first editorial provides good context for this undertaking. A press release on the publication can be found at RIO.) I must be honest: it was an instinctively scary prospect to publish my grant proposal, even after being funded. It condenses years of toil and accumulated knowledge – as an early-career scientist, most of… Continue reading To boldly go… publishing my grant proposal in RIO — Mostly Physics

Elaine Morgan had sass. In Descent of Woman, published in 1972, she asked her readers to take science into their own hands. “Try a bit of fieldwork,” she suggested. “Go out of your front door and try to spot some live specimens of Homo sapiens in his natural habitat. It shouldn’t be difficult because the… Continue reading Tarzan Wasn’t for Her – Issue 100: Outsiders

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