Information Theory Finds the Best Wordle Starting Words

How did you spend the past few years as the COVID pandemic raged and limited our leisure options? Software developer Josh Wardle and his partner passed the time with crossword puzzles from the New York Times. At one point, Wardle remembered an idea for a similar game he had thought up a few years earlier. The word game… Continue reading Information Theory Finds the Best Wordle Starting Words

Strange Material Breaks a Classic Rule of Physics

A basic tenet of college physics is that as pressure increases, thermal conductivity—a material’s ability to conduct heat—increases, too, because atoms that are squeezed together interact more. More than a century of research has confirmed this rule. But engineers have now found an exception: when they applied intense pressure to boron arsenide, a recently discovered… Continue reading Strange Material Breaks a Classic Rule of Physics

A Mutation Turned Ants Into Parasites in One Generation

These workerless social parasites, sometimes called inquilines (from the Latin word for “tenants”), have a distinctive appearance that to human eyes easily sets them apart from their hosts. But their parasitic scheme succeeds because they have evolved ways to steal chemical odors from the host nest to camouflage themselves. Genomic analyses have shown that ant… Continue reading A Mutation Turned Ants Into Parasites in One Generation

This Pioneering Nuclear Fusion Lab Is Gearing Up to Break More Records

Last month, the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) fired its lasers up to full power for the first time since December, when it achieved its decades-long goal of ‘ignition’ by producing more energy during a nuclear reaction than it consumed. The latest run didn’t come close to matching up: NIF achieved only 4% of the output it… Continue reading This Pioneering Nuclear Fusion Lab Is Gearing Up to Break More Records

With a Planned Moon Launch, NASA Must Put Safety First

The U.S. is once again sending people to the moon. The world met the crew of the planned Artemis II mission in early April and celebrated an upcoming 10-day voyage that should both stir nostalgia and fuel a new generation’s love of crewed spaceflight. But after multiple space catastrophes in the past 60 years, Project… Continue reading With a Planned Moon Launch, NASA Must Put Safety First

These Are the Places at Greatest Risk from Extreme Heat

CLIMATEWIRE | A record-shattering heat wave that blistered the Pacific Northwest in 2021 carried an important lesson, scientists say. Places that historically haven’t had to deal with extreme heat may not be prepared when it strikes. That was true across the lush, temperate regions of Oregon, Washington state and British Columbia, where air conditioning was still… Continue reading These Are the Places at Greatest Risk from Extreme Heat

A New Kind of Symmetry Shakes Up Physics

Seiberg and his colleagues imagined the one-dimensional string as being surrounded by a surface, a two-dimensional plane, so that it looked like a line drawn on a sheet of paper. Instead of measuring charge along the string, they described a method for measuring the total charge across the surface surrounding the string. “The really new… Continue reading A New Kind of Symmetry Shakes Up Physics

How Can Some Infinities Be Bigger Than Others?

The idea of infinity is probably about as old as numbers themselves, going back to whenever people first realized that they could keep counting forever. But even though we have a sign for infinity and can refer to the concept in casual conversation, infinity remains profoundly mysterious, even to mathematicians. In this episode, Steven Strogatz… Continue reading How Can Some Infinities Be Bigger Than Others?

Proteins Never Seen in Nature Are Designed Using AI to Address Biomedical and Industrial Problems Unsolved by Evolution

Machine learning (ML) and other AI- based computational tools have proven their prowess at predicting real-world protein structures. AlphaFold 2, an algorithm developed by scientists at DeepMind that can confidently predict protein structure purely on the basis of an amino acid sequence, has become almost a household name since its launch in July 2021. Today,… Continue reading Proteins Never Seen in Nature Are Designed Using AI to Address Biomedical and Industrial Problems Unsolved by Evolution

How Magnetic Fields Control Galactic Growth

The Milky Way’s rotating disk of gas and dust gives rise to graceful spiral arms, which make up the galaxy’s most active star formation sites. Now researchers using an airplane-borne telescope high in Earth’s atmosphere have found a mechanism for how magnetic fields shape star birth in the dense filaments, or “bones,” that wind their… Continue reading How Magnetic Fields Control Galactic Growth