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
Tag: Quantum Stuff
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
Why the Brain’s Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed
Dazzling intricacies of brain structure are revealed every day, but one of the most obvious aspects of brain wiring eludes neuroscientists. The nervous system is cross-wired, so that the left side of the brain controls the right half of the body and vice versa. Every doctor relies upon this fact in performing neurological exams, but… Continue reading Why the Brain’s Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed
How Physicists Cracked a Black Hole Paradox
A few years ago a team of chemists unboiled an egg. Boiling causes protein molecules in the egg to twist around one another, and a centrifuge can disentangle them to restore the original. The technique is of dubious utility in a kitchen, but it neatly demonstrates the reversibility of physics. Anything in the physical world… Continue reading How Physicists Cracked a Black Hole Paradox
Greatest Migration on Earth Happens under Darkness Every Day
Every evening around the world trillions of zooplankton, many smaller than a grain of rice, hover hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea, waiting for their signal. Scientists long considered these tiny animals to be drifters, passive specks suspended in the ocean, moved by the whims of tides and currents. And yet, just… Continue reading Greatest Migration on Earth Happens under Darkness Every Day