Category: Quantum Stuff

Many scientists at the federal health agencies await the second Donald Trump administration with dread as well as uncertainty over how the president-elect will reconcile starkly different philosophies among the leaders of his team. Trump has promised he would allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild” on medicines, food, and health. With that, a… Continue reading What Might Happen to Public Health under RFK, Jr.

[CLIP: Sound of Arecibo message being sent] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. On November 16, 1974, humanity sent an unprecedented message into the stars. [CLIP: Frank Drake gives a speech on the day of the Arecibo transmission: “If we go as far away as Mars or the other planets and… Continue reading How Astronomers Tried to Communicate with the Cosmos

To see how, consider two reference frames; we’ll label them A and B. Let’s say that A’s origin is anchored to a quantum object that has probabilities of being found in various locations. From the perspective of B, A’s location is smeared over some region. But from the perspective of A, the distance to B… Continue reading In the Quantum World, Even Points of View Are Uncertain

No device is an island: Your daily computational needs depend on more than just the microprocessors inside your computer or phone. Our modern world relies on “distributed computing,” which shares the computational load among multiple different machines. The technique passes data back and forth in an elaborate choreography of digital bits — a dance that… Continue reading What Is Distributed Computing? | Quanta Magazine

In August, a pair of mathematicians discovered an exotic, record-breaking curve. In doing so, they tapped into a major open question about one of the oldest and most fundamental kinds of equations in mathematics. Elliptic curves, which date back to at least ancient Greece, are central to many areas of study. They have a rich… Continue reading New Elliptic Curve Breaks 18-Year-Old Record

But the chemical assembly process probably doesn’t end in the cloud. According to Booth, “we’ve got some really interesting results that might tell us that we’re enhancing [chemical] complexity during planet formation.” As material moves around in the disk, it experiences dramatically varying conditions. The disk’s surface is exposed to heat and radiation, while its… Continue reading The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules

Every now and again I’ll get a weird thought in my head that sits there demanding an answer. Sometimes it’s trivial, and sometimes it sounds silly but then leads into some fun insights. This time, my brain decided to fixate on a simple question: What’s the roundest object in the universe? By that I mean,… Continue reading What’s the Roundest Object in the Universe?

For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience. This rule acted like the key to a lock. If you had the key, you could unscramble the message;… Continue reading How Public Key Cryptography Really Works

November 15, 2024 4 min read Ending NASA’s Chandra Will Cut Us Out of the High-Resolution X-Ray Universe The Chandra X-ray Observatory is facing closure. Shutting it down would be a loss to science as a whole By María Arias NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as it may appear at about 50,000 miles from Earth, nearly… Continue reading Ending NASA’s Chandra Will Cut Us Out of the High-Resolution X-Ray Universe

November 15, 2024 3 min read Miaou! Curly Tails Give Cats an ‘Accent’ A genetic mutation makes some cats’ tail curl over their back, giving them something akin to an accent when they communicate with other kitties By Christa Lesté-Lasserre Baby the cat has a genetic mutation that makes his tail curl over his back… Continue reading Miaou! Curly Tails Give Cats an ‘Accent’