Tag: Quantum Stuff

Imagine 100 dots scattered in front of you. In a haphazard variation on connect-the-dots, start drawing lines between the points. How many lines can you draw without producing a triangle? A square? An 11-pointed star? These types of problems have a long history in mathematics. In a paper posted on April 26, Oliver Janzer and… Continue reading New Proof Shows When Structure Must Emerge in Graphs

The precursors of phoenixin and nesfatin are not used directly as neuropeptides by nervous systems; instead, these long peptides are chemical precursors that get chopped up and processed into smaller molecules that become the functional, mature neuropeptides. Their hidden identity may be why they were not identified as promising leads earlier. A further search of… Continue reading Brain-Signal Proteins Evolved Before Animals Did

Explore Around 450 B.C., Anaxagoras of Clazomenae had some time to think. The Greek mathematician was in prison for claiming the sun was not a god, but rather an incandescent rock as big as the Peloponnese peninsula. A philosopher who believed that “reason rules the world,” he used his incarceration to grapple with a now-famous… Continue reading An Ancient Geometry Problem Falls to New Mathematical Techniques

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. You’re probably familiar with the concept of evolution. Living things evolve by accumulating genetic changes, which are then weeded out or preserved through a process of natural selection. Turns out the same thing happens in music. And by using the same software that’s used to… Continue reading Researchers Analyzed Folk Music like It Was Mutating DNA: They Found Amazing Parallels between Life and Art

Over the decades, mathematicians made partial progress toward a proof. They showed, for instance, that the conjecture was true for particular types of primitive sets. Still, “it felt like we weren’t really all that close to it before Jared started working on it,” said Greg Martin, a mathematician at the University of British Columbia who… Continue reading Graduate Student’s Side Project Proves Prime Number Conjecture

From the window of a passenger plane flying over the Amazon, the view is breathtaking. “It’s just miles across of river and river islands,” said Lukas Musher, a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences. The massive rivers below branch into a dense, treelike network that has continuously rearranged itself over hundreds of… Continue reading Reshuffled Rivers Bolster the Amazon’s Hyper-Biodiversity

Officials from 175 countries agreed yesterday to craft a global treaty over the next two years with the aim of ending plastic pollution. The final treaty could be a game-changer for lands and oceans awash in plastic bottles and packaging. Castoff plastics choke and entangle animals, are ingested by people as tiny particles in food,… Continue reading Countries Pave the Way to End Plastic Pollution

The first major attempt to replicate striking evidence of the ‘cosmic dawn’—the appearance of the Universe’s first stars 180 million years after the Big Bang—has muddled the picture. Four years after radio astronomers reported finding a signature of the cosmic dawn, radio astronomer Ravi Subrahmanyan and his collaborators describe how they floated an antenna on… Continue reading New Result Casts Doubt on ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Claim

Explore Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve on a plot. Such a bump is the unmistakable signature of “resonance,” one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in… Continue reading How the Physics of Resonance Shapes Reality

Imaginary numbers are not imaginary at all. The truth is, they have had far more impact on our lives than anything truly imaginary ever could. Without imaginary numbers, and the vital role they played in putting electricity into homes, factories, and internet server-farms, the modern world would not exist. Students who might complain to their… Continue reading Imaginary Numbers Are Reality