Kirby has historically been a skeptic of the existence of structural biases in mathematics, including regarding the field’s gender imbalance. In the 1970s, about 10% of mathematicians were women; today almost 30% are, according to a 2020 report by the International Science Council. In an article that he wrote in the 1990s, and which was… Continue reading A New Agenda for Low-Dimensional Topology
Category: Quantum Stuff
The Opioid Crisis Is Now Being Tracked with Wastewater
Wastewater-based epidemiology, the process of monitoring health indicators through sewage, has become a common way to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. But before 2020 scientists were using the technology to follow a different public health threat: the opioid crisis. Just as sewage data can fill gaps in SARS-CoV-2 tracking, this… Continue reading The Opioid Crisis Is Now Being Tracked with Wastewater
Climate Concern Grows Nationwide, Even in Some Republican States
CLIMATEWIRE | American voters are increasingly concerned about global warming, a new national public opinion analysis found, but that hasn’t changed the deeply partisan lens through which voters still view climate policy. The 2023 Yale Climate Opinion Maps report released Tuesday found that two-thirds of Americans agree that “developing clean energy should be a priority for the president… Continue reading Climate Concern Grows Nationwide, Even in Some Republican States
Toilet Taboos Can Make Scientific Fieldwork Dangerous
Gawain Antell knew something was seriously wrong when students started vomiting. In spring 2019, the paleobiologist — then earning a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford — was working as a teaching assistant on a geological mapping field trip in Scotland when, after returning to the hotel, a handful of undergraduate women grew grievously ill.… Continue reading Toilet Taboos Can Make Scientific Fieldwork Dangerous
China’s New Dark Matter Lab Is Biggest and Deepest Yet
Some 2,400 metres below the Jinping Mountains in southwest China, the world’s deepest and largest underground laboratory has just opened. The enormous space is home to scientists who are hunting down dark matter — the hypothetical substance that is thought to make up more than 80% of the mass in the Universe. The China Jinping… Continue reading China’s New Dark Matter Lab Is Biggest and Deepest Yet
Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual qubits. Second, it came with a procedure for correcting errors as they occurred, preventing them… Continue reading Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information
Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand
Transnational security investigator Abdelkader Abderrahmane set out from the Moroccan city of Kenitra with two research assistants to inspect sand-mining sites on the Atlantic Ocean coast. They drove across the dry, flat terrain for six kilometers, the last stretch on a rutted dirt road that had them crawling in low gear, windows closed against the… Continue reading Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand
Your Body Has Its Own Built-In Ozempic
January 25, 2024 4 min read Your Body Has Its Own Built-In Ozempic Popular weight-loss and diabetes drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, target metabolic pathways that gut microbes and food molecules already play a key role in regulating By Christopher Damman & The Conversation US The following essay is reprinted with permission from The… Continue reading Your Body Has Its Own Built-In Ozempic
Babies Exposed to COVID in the Womb Are More Likely to Suffer Breathing Problems
More than four years after the virus that causes COVID first appeared, scientists continue to discover new ways that the illness threatens pregnant people and babies—as well as additional evidence that vaccination offers significant protection. A new study finds that babies born to women who got COVID while they were pregnant were three times more… Continue reading Babies Exposed to COVID in the Womb Are More Likely to Suffer Breathing Problems
A Quantum Trick Implied Eternal Stability. Now It’s Falling Apart.
For a true phase transition in one dimension, mathematicians had proved that two of these exponents must be greater than 2. But the MBL simulations had found them to be 1 — a major disagreement. In a still-unpublished preprint posted in 2015, Oganesyan and Chandran, together with Christopher Laumann of Boston University, showed that the… Continue reading A Quantum Trick Implied Eternal Stability. Now It’s Falling Apart.