The summer sun has been anything but fun for many this year. Brutal temperatures torched records across the U.S. as they peaked globally in July. Relentless heat waves baked the Southwest and rolled into the Midwest and South, occasionally enveloping other regions that are completely unaccustomed to such extremes. Exposure to this kind of heat… Continue reading Six Ways to Stay Safe Outdoors in Extreme Heat
Tag: Quantum Stuff
Hiroshima’s Anniversary Marks an Injustice Done to Blast Survivors
On August 6, 1945, the U.S. used an atomic bomb for the first time in history, against the city of Hiroshima. The U.S. dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later. Experts estimate that the two bombs instantly killed more than 100,000 people. The movie Oppenheimer has rightly received critical acclaim as a masterful… Continue reading Hiroshima’s Anniversary Marks an Injustice Done to Blast Survivors
How Simple Math Moves the Needle
Imagine you’re rolling down the street in a driverless car when you see a problem ahead. An Amazon delivery driver got their van halfway past a double-parked UPS truck before realizing they couldn’t make it through. Now they’re stuck. And so are you. The street is too narrow to pull off a U-ey, so your… Continue reading How Simple Math Moves the Needle
Covid-19 mRNA Vaccines Win Nobel Prize for Medicine 2023
The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their pioneering work in the development of mRNA vaccine technology, which made possible a timely vaccine response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus are credited with helping to curb the spread of… Continue reading Covid-19 mRNA Vaccines Win Nobel Prize for Medicine 2023
Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize
To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate reality on almost inconceivably brief timescales. Between the 1980s and… Continue reading Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize Honors Inventors of ‘Quantum Dot’ Nanoparticles
Imagine a nanocrystal so minuscule that it behaves like an atom. Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering a category of such minute marvels, now known as quantum dots, and for developing a precise method of synthesizing them. Quantum dots are… Continue reading Nobel Prize Honors Inventors of ‘Quantum Dot’ Nanoparticles
Red Meat Allergy Caused by Tick Bite Is Spreading—And Nearly Half of Doctors Don’t Know about It
Ticks are annoying creatures. These nasty, bloodsucking parasites glom on to you when you least suspect it. And if they’re not removed in time, they can transmit a startling range of pretty horrible diseases. The bite of the lone star tick, found in the U.S. South, Midwest and mid-Atlantic, can trigger a bizarre and sometimes… Continue reading Red Meat Allergy Caused by Tick Bite Is Spreading—And Nearly Half of Doctors Don’t Know about It
What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells
So far, these mechanisms across systems and scales — in the developing embryo’s segmentation clock, in a single developing neuron, and in more fundamental protein machinery — have all continued to beat in time. “Pretty much everything we looked at so far is scaling,” Pourquié said, “which means that there is a global command for… Continue reading What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells
We Need Smart Intellectual Property Laws for Artificial Intelligence
Once a backwater filled with speculation, artificial intelligence is now a burning, “hair on fire” conflagration of both hopes and fears about the revolutionary technological transformation. A profound uncertainty surrounds these intelligent systems—which already surpass human capabilities in some domains—and their regulation. Making the right choices for how to protect or control the technology is… Continue reading We Need Smart Intellectual Property Laws for Artificial Intelligence
New ‘Physics-Inspired’ Generative AI Exceeds Expectations
The tools of artificial intelligence — neural networks in particular — have been good to physicists. For years, this technology has helped researchers reconstruct particle trajectories in accelerator experiments, search for evidence of new particles, and detect gravitational waves and exoplanets. While AI tools can clearly do a lot for physicists, the question now, according… Continue reading New ‘Physics-Inspired’ Generative AI Exceeds Expectations