You aren’t worried about catching a virus from your samples? Not at all. Everything inside is dead. Every biological process has been disrupted by formalin. This is why the preparation is so amenable to preserving viral RNA: You put a complete stop to every enzymatic process, including the degradation of RNA. But humans carry respiratory… Continue reading The Viral Paleontologist Who Unearths Pathogens’ Deep Histories
Tag: Quantum Stuff
JWST Images Freezing Giant Exoplanet 12 Light-Years Away
JWST Images Freezing Giant Exoplanet 12 Light-Years Away The Jupiter-like world Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest—and closest—exoplanets that astronomers have ever seen By Davide Castelvecchi & Nature magazine The exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab. Blue scalelike features are visible in the background, with the host star’s light being blocked by a black circle… Continue reading JWST Images Freezing Giant Exoplanet 12 Light-Years Away
How Does Math Keep Secrets?
Can you keep a secret? Modern techniques for maintaining the confidentiality of information are based on mathematical problems that are inherently too difficult for anyone to solve without the right hints. Yet what does that mean when quantum computers capable of solving many problems astronomically faster are on the horizon? In this episode, host Janna… Continue reading How Does Math Keep Secrets?
What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images
Two years ago, Sarah Shomstein realized she didn’t have a mind’s eye. The vision scientist was sitting in a seminar room, listening to a scientific talk, when the presenter asked the audience to imagine an apple. Shomstein closed her eyes and did so. Then, the presenter asked the crowd to open their eyes and rate… Continue reading What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images
What Is Analog Computing? | Quanta Magazine
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.AgreeBy… Continue reading What Is Analog Computing? | Quanta Magazine
Catching Fish with Ancient Archaeology and Ocean Tides
[CLIP: Theme music] Rachel Feltman: What do you think of when you hear the word “archaeology”? Maybe your mind goes straight to Indiana Jones. Or perhaps you picture real-world academics in the field—ones who handle their dusty desert dig sites and crumbling artifacts with far more care. But studying how ancient humans lived and died… Continue reading Catching Fish with Ancient Archaeology and Ocean Tides
Grad Students Find Inevitable Patterns in Big Sets of Numbers
Forty years later, in 1975, a mathematician named Endre Szemerédi proved the conjecture. His work spawned multiple lines of research that mathematicians are still exploring today. “Many of the ideas from his proof grew into worlds of their own,” said Yufei Zhao, Sah and Sawhney’s doctoral adviser at MIT. Mathematicians have built on Szemerédi’s result… Continue reading Grad Students Find Inevitable Patterns in Big Sets of Numbers
Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect
In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere — the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ central conclusion: that every time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere doubles, Earth’s temperature will rise between 2 and 5… Continue reading Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect
Will AI Ever Have Common Sense?
Ask a question of ChatGPT and other, similar chatbots and there’s a good chance you’ll be impressed at how adeptly it comes up with a good answer — unless it spits out unrealistic nonsense instead. Part of what’s mystifying about these kinds of machine learning systems is that they are fundamentally black boxes. No one… Continue reading Will AI Ever Have Common Sense?
Taylor Swift and Bach Can Thank Ancient Temples for Modern Music
Where did Western music come from? Most historical accounts credit composers with the first formations of simple tunes, which eventually led to “early music” and later classical music and the many popular forms that have since sprung up. But acoustic ecologists and musicologists have been talking lately about a different foundation: the earliest temples and… Continue reading Taylor Swift and Bach Can Thank Ancient Temples for Modern Music