Tag: Quantum Stuff

After the first-ever explosion of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945 near Socorro, N.M., J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, recited a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Less than a month later, a quarter of a million lives were lost to the… Continue reading The Manhattan Project Shows Scientists’ Moral and Ethical Responsibilities

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 Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight

In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein’s equations that precisely described the space-time outside what we now call a rotating black hole. (The term wouldn’t be coined for a few more years.) In the nearly six decades since his achievement, researchers have tried to show that these so-called Kerr black holes… Continue reading Black Holes Finally Proven Mathematically Stable

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist who studies the evolution of the terrestrial planets and life on Earth, fell in love with science as a girl because considering the vast scales of time and space inherent in studying geology gave her some solace from her personal troubles—it made them seem small and surmountable. A sense of… Continue reading This Planetary Scientist Is Always Reaching for Something Big

Recently, Li and his colleagues used their method to characterize sporopollenin from more than 100 diverse land plant species collected from botanic gardens around the northeastern United States. According to Li, who is preparing to submit the results of the study for publication, the structure of sporopollenin varies across plant types in a curious pattern.… Continue reading How the ‘Diamond of the Plant World’ Helped Land Plants Evolve

In just 17 years messenger RNA therapies have gone from proof of concept to global salvation. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for COVID-19 have been given to hundreds of millions of people, saving countless lives. In 2005 Katalin Karikó and I created a way to make mRNA molecules that would not cause dangerous inflammation when… Continue reading Messenger RNA Therapies Are Finally Fulfilling Their Promise

The prints are also helping us to distinguish different types of substructures. For instance, if you’re looking at a filament in two spatial dimensions, it might actually be a two-dimensional sheet that you’re just looking at on its side. And that’s hard to make out in a flat picture — or even a computer simulation.… Continue reading The Astrophysicist Who Sculpts Stars Before They Are Born

When Lee Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford, explained to his students what his term “fundamental attribution error” meant, he loved to quote George Carlin. “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” The late comedian perfectly captured our tendency… Continue reading Are You a Naïve Realist?

Similarly, 7! + 4 is divisible by 4, 7! + 5 by 5, 7! + 6 by 6, and 7! + 7  by 7, which makes 7! + 2, 7! + 3, 7! + 4, 7! + 5, 7! + 6, 7! + 7 a sequence of six consecutive composite numbers. We have a prime… Continue reading How Can Infinitely Many Primes Be Infinitely Far Apart?

As soon as President Biden unveiled the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on July 11, Massimo Pascale and his team sprang into action. Coordinating over Slack, Pascale, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and 14 collaborators divvied up tasks. The image showed thousands of galaxies in a pinprick-size portion… Continue reading Two Weeks In, the Webb Space Telescope Is Reshaping Astronomy