Category: Quantum Stuff

John Jay Hopkins’s visit to Japan in 1955, as an informal emissary of “Atoms for Peace,” must have seemed surreal to everyone involved. Hopkins was the head of an old American shipbuilding firm based out of Groton, Connecticut. Electric Boat Company had struggled in the 1920s and 1930s with its reputation as a “merchant of… Continue reading The Disneyfication of Atomic Power – Issue 107: The Edge

The road from finding to publication is rarely entirely straightforward. As often is the case – but rather too rarely talked about in public – the road from a finding to a publication is rarely entirely straightforward. This was the case for us as well. From the beginning, we felt we had very beautiful results, and furthermore, the agreement that emerged between our detailed simulations and the… Continue reading Moving silicon atoms in graphene with atomic precision — Mostly Physics

COVID, Quickly, Episode 15: Booster Shot Approvals–plus Vaccines for Kids? Today, we’re going to bust through the confusion about booster vaccines: who can get them and who can’t, and we’ll talk about one group that hasn’t even gotten first shots yet: kids under 12. We’ll discuss when that could finally happen. Air date: September 24,… Continue reading Covid, Quickly: A Pop-Up Podcast

In a burst of work, mathematicians have moved closer to understanding just how many ways there are of contorting a simple sphere so that, in the end, it still resembles itself. Much of the progress comes from results by Tadayuki Watanabe at Kyoto University. Over the last several years, he has figured out how to… Continue reading How Tadayuki Watanabe Disproved a Major Conjecture About Spheres

When a male African savanna elephant folds his ears while simultaneously waving them, he’s ready for a fight. When a female folds her ears and accompanies the action with an ear flap, that means she’s also issuing a serious threat. But when elephants come together and fold their ears while also rapidly flapping them, the… Continue reading The First ‘Google Translate’ for Elephants Debuts

At first, they trickle in: one bird here, a few birds there. Then, at dusk’s cue, a dark smudge materializes on the horizon. Thousands of starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) slowly come into focus, etching flight paths across the winter sky as they stream toward their evening roost in north-central England. Suddenly, the flock dips and twists… Continue reading Order Flocking Out of Chaos – Issue 107: The Edge

India’s relatively mild first wave of COVID last year intrigued scientists and led the country’s leadership to declare what turned out to be a very premature victory over the novel coronavirus. The current surge has been much more deadly. Some researchers and media outlets have pinned the blame on new viral variants, which early studies… Continue reading Why India’s Second COVID Surge Is So Much Worse Than the First

In everyday language, the word “transcendental” connotes something that’s beyond the ordinary, something that is hidden and mysterious, with almost magical or mystical powers. In mathematics, on the other hand, the meaning of the term “transcendental” is more mundane. It simply describes the class of the infinitely many numbers that cannot be solutions of polynomial… Continue reading Where Transcendental Numbers Hide in Everyday Math

In 1993, deep underground at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a few flashes of light inside a bus-size tank of oil kicked off a detective story that is yet to reach its conclusion. The Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) was searching for bursts of radiation created by neutrinos, the lightest and most elusive… Continue reading Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles?

Emily Mullin: This is 60-Second Science. I’m Emily Mullin. In the past 20 years alone, three coronaviruses have caused major disease outbreaks. First came the original SARS virus in 2002. Then, in 2012, MERS was identified. In 2019 SARS-CoV-2 emerged, setting off a global pandemic. Hundreds of other coronaviruses are known to be circulating in bats… Continue reading A ‘Universal’ Coronavirus Vaccine to Prevent the Next Pandemic