Category: Quantum Stuff

Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Harmony” issue in July, 2021. In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book… Continue reading Plants Feel Pain and Might Even See – Issue 111: Spotlight

Gravitational-wave observatories have released their latest catalogue of cosmic collisions, bringing their total number of detections to 90. The new crop of 35 events includes one featuring the lightest neutron star ever seen, as well as two clashes involving surprisingly large black holes. The detections come from the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) sites,… Continue reading Astrophysicists Unveil Glut of Gravitational-Wave Detections

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 The Year in Math and Computer Science

Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Harmony” issue in July, 2021. One of my favorite walkways in the world spans a beautiful fig in the village of Falealupo on the island of Savai’i, Samoa, formerly Western Samoa. My… Continue reading The Incredible Fig – Issue 111: Spotlight

Sarah Vitak: This is Scientific American’s 60 Second Science. I’m Sarah Vitak. So many of the objects we interact with nowadays run on programming and are designed for an exact purpose. We don’t typically think of living things as falling into this category, but more and more scientists are programming and designing living cells and… Continue reading Engineered Bacteria Use Air Bubbles as Acoustically Detonated Tumor TNT

Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Harmony” issue in July, 2021. Japanese cuisine is so varied and refined that it’s hard to happen upon something unpleasant to the palate. My personal procedure in Japan is to take a… Continue reading Life Always Wins. Follow Me – Issue 111: Spotlight

Notice that shifting a remainder of 7 up by 1 makes it 7 + 1 = 8, and if a number has a “remainder” of 8 when divided by 8, it’s actually a multiple of 8, so its remainder is really 0 mod 8. This means that the system of congruences x ≡ 1 mod 5x ≡… Continue reading What Hot Dogs Can Teach Us About Number Theory

The death of George Floyd in 2020 sparked intense emotion, and increased recognition of the need to take active measures in matters of race within science and academia. This piece considers the field’s immediate actions with regard to Black representation at neuroscience conferences, and whether we are rising to the occasion in an area under… Continue reading Many Neuroscience Conferences Still Have No Black Speakers

Do you ever feel like someone is watching you? They could be. And I’m not talking about the odd neighbors at the end of your street. This summer, at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, my colleague Jacky Faherty and I identified 1,715 stars in… Continue reading Where Aliens Could Be Watching Us – Issue 106: Intelligent Life

Thomas Gehrmann remembers the deluge of mathematical expressions that came cascading down his computer screen one day 20 years ago. He was trying to calculate the odds that three jets of elementary particles would erupt from two particles smashing together. It was the type of bread-and-butter calculation physicists often do to check whether their theories… Continue reading The Algorithm That Lets Particle Physicists Count Higher Than Two