Category: Quantum Stuff

Say two parties, Alice and Bob, want to exchange a message in secret, even under the watchful gaze of a potential attacker. They begin with a collection of points connected by edges called a graph. Each point represents a different elliptic curve. If you can transform one curve into another in a particular way (via… Continue reading ‘Post-Quantum’ Cryptography Scheme Is Cracked on a Laptop

Explore Look down at the Pacific Ocean from outer space and it appears to take up most of the globe. That’s how vast it is. Come back down and onto a sailboat, this time in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Weeks from any shore, you could still be closer to the International Space Station… Continue reading It’s High Time to Protect Our High Seas

Dreams are so personal, subjective and fleeting, they might seem impossible to study directly and with scientific objectivity. But in recent decades, laboratories around the world have developed sophisticated techniques for getting into the minds of people while they are dreaming. In the process, they are learning more about why we need these strange nightly… Continue reading Why and How Do We Dream?

That said, you can’t simply look at the normal bundles of the individual lines and immediately translate that to an understanding of the normal bundle of the hyperbola. That’s because at the point where the two lines meet, the normal bundle misbehaves, in a sense. Instead, mathematicians have to study the normal bundle with certain… Continue reading Old Problem About Algebraic Curves Falls to Young Mathematicians

A sweltering mid-June day with temperatures topping 100 degrees spurred one of the largest livestock die-offs in recent Kansas history, killing about 2,000 cattle. Twice that many cattle perished in fierce 2011 Iowa heat, with thousands more dying in neighboring states. And a July 1995 heat wave took a similar toll in the Farm Belt.… Continue reading Putting Cows in Forests Could Prevent Heat-Related Losses

Quanta Magazine > 0; if (typeof predicate !== ‘function’) { throw new TypeError(‘predicate must be a function’); } var thisArg = arguments[1]; var k = 0; while (k We care about your data, and we’d like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.Agree… Continue reading A Biochemist’s View of Life’s Origin Reframes Cancer and Aging

After more than a decade of development, NASA’s new moon rocket will finally attempt to shed the shackles of Earth’s gravity and soar into space. The space agency has officially set August 29 as the launch date for its Artemis I mission. This flight will be the beginning of an intricate series of spaceflights that… Continue reading NASA’s Artemis I Moon Mission Is ‘Go’ for Launch

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. After an exhausting day at the office, it’s hard not to smile when you’re greeted by a delirious display of uncontrolled canine joy. [Dog greeting] But it’s not just the happy yapping and wriggling tail wagging that tug at our heartstrings. [Dog greeting] Because… Continue reading Dogs Actually Tear Up When Their Owners Come Home

“We’re learning there’s a lot more to learn about nothing than we thought,” said Isabel Garcia Garcia, a particle physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in California. “How much more are we missing?” So far, such studies have led to a dramatic conclusion: Our universe may sit on a platform of shoddy construction, a… Continue reading How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything

In the third century BCE, Archimedes posed a riddle about herding cattle that, he claimed, only a truly wise person could solve. His problem ultimately boiled down to an equation that involves the difference between two squared terms, which can be written as x2 – dy2 = 1. Here, d is an integer — a… Continue reading Ancient Equations Offer New Look at Number Groups