Category: Quantum Stuff

Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Harmony” issue in July, 2021. One of my favorite walkways in the world spans a beautiful fig in the village of Falealupo on the island of Savai’i, Samoa, formerly Western Samoa. My… Continue reading The Incredible Fig – Issue 111: Spotlight

Sarah Vitak: This is Scientific American’s 60 Second Science. I’m Sarah Vitak. So many of the objects we interact with nowadays run on programming and are designed for an exact purpose. We don’t typically think of living things as falling into this category, but more and more scientists are programming and designing living cells and… Continue reading Engineered Bacteria Use Air Bubbles as Acoustically Detonated Tumor TNT

Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Harmony” issue in July, 2021. Japanese cuisine is so varied and refined that it’s hard to happen upon something unpleasant to the palate. My personal procedure in Japan is to take a… Continue reading Life Always Wins. Follow Me – Issue 111: Spotlight

Notice that shifting a remainder of 7 up by 1 makes it 7 + 1 = 8, and if a number has a “remainder” of 8 when divided by 8, it’s actually a multiple of 8, so its remainder is really 0 mod 8. This means that the system of congruences x ≡ 1 mod 5x ≡… Continue reading What Hot Dogs Can Teach Us About Number Theory

The death of George Floyd in 2020 sparked intense emotion, and increased recognition of the need to take active measures in matters of race within science and academia. This piece considers the field’s immediate actions with regard to Black representation at neuroscience conferences, and whether we are rising to the occasion in an area under… Continue reading Many Neuroscience Conferences Still Have No Black Speakers

Do you ever feel like someone is watching you? They could be. And I’m not talking about the odd neighbors at the end of your street. This summer, at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, my colleague Jacky Faherty and I identified 1,715 stars in… Continue reading Where Aliens Could Be Watching Us – Issue 106: Intelligent Life

Thomas Gehrmann remembers the deluge of mathematical expressions that came cascading down his computer screen one day 20 years ago. He was trying to calculate the odds that three jets of elementary particles would erupt from two particles smashing together. It was the type of bread-and-butter calculation physicists often do to check whether their theories… Continue reading The Algorithm That Lets Particle Physicists Count Higher Than Two

Gray blotches poke up from the murky depths of Lake Michigan in an image on maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen’s computer screen. These are the remains of the SS Wisconsin, an steel-hulled steamer that sank in 1929 off Kenosha, Wis., after a storm engulfed the vessel during a routine passage between Chicago and Milwaukee. The shipwreck… Continue reading Dozens of Shipwreck Discoveries Anticipated in New Marine Sanctuary

Let me tell you what it’s like to be an astrobiologist. I painted a white picket fence this summer. No one asked me to. It was a task I’d set myself without realizing what a long-winded and frustrating process it would be. But eventually that endless scraping, priming, painting, and maneuvering settled into something therapeutic,… Continue reading What Is Life? – Issue 106: Intelligent Life

I had barely stepped foot over the threshold and I already felt claustrophobic. I wanted to turn back. People shuffled into the room in front of me, while somebody else stood directly behind me, a little too close. It felt hard to escape. I could see Nola lying in a bed to my right. She… Continue reading Why These Children Fell into Endless Sleep – Issue 107: The Edge