Category: Quantum Stuff

David McComas has a favorite “astrosphere,” the environment created by a star’s stellar wind as it buffets the surrounding interstellar medium. It belongs to a star named Mira. In an image from 2006, Mira is heading to the right, at 291,000 miles an hour, five times the speed our sun ambles through its local interstellar… Continue reading The Safety Belt of Our Solar System – Issue 107: The Edge

If you have a few chess sets at home, try the following exercise: Arrange eight queens on a board so that none of them are attacking each other. If you succeed once, can you find a second arrangement? A third? How many are there? This challenge is over 150 years old. It is the earliest… Continue reading Mathematician Answers Chess Problem About Attacking Queens

Amazon.com and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos will fly on the first crewed flight of the New Shepard suborbital vehicle, the billionaire announced on Instagram on Monday (June 7). The flight is scheduled for July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The New Shepard capsule, which operates autonomously and does not need a pilot, will launch… Continue reading Jeff Bezos Will Go to Space on Blue Origin’s First Crewed Flight

The first review article that I have written (with Paola Ayala and Thomas Pichler) has just come out in the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology (CC-BY open access). The purpose of review articles is to summarize – to the best of one’s abilities – the current best understanding of a topic. While previous experimental work by the author… Continue reading My first review article (CC-BY) — Mostly Physics

Neural networks need to “dream” of weird, senseless examples to learn well. Maybe we do, too.Photo Illustration by MDV Edwards / Shutterstock For many of us over the last year and more, our waking experience has, you might say, lost a bit of its variety. We spend more time with the same people, in our… Continue reading Weird Dreams Train Our Brains to Be Better Learners – Facts So Romantic

I have a new article just out, published as a Rapid Communication in Physical Review B. The work is a computational study co-authored with Duncan Mowbray and Mathias Ljungberg from San Sebastian, Spain, and Paola Ayala from Vienna. As described in the post about my recent review article, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy is an extremely useful tool for studying… Continue reading Calculating the graphene C 1s core level binding energy — Mostly Physics

The photos from a historic flyby of our solar system’s largest moon are starting to roll in. On Monday (June 7), NASA’s Juno probe zoomed within just 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of Jupiter’s enormous satellite Ganymede, which is bigger than the planet Mercury. It was the closest any probe had come to Ganymede since May 2000, when NASA’s Galileo… Continue reading Ganymede Looks Glorious in New Images from NASA’s Juno Mission

Imagine, then, that every time a new cluster forms, its experience recapitulates this process, with the same differences in the environments of the inner and outer cells driving the same divergent responses. You begin to see how the story of what was once a unicellular creature can be rewritten, its body a palimpsest of what… Continue reading Single Cells Evolve Large Multicellular Forms in Just Two Years

Over the past century, many notable viruses have emerged from animals to cause widespread illness and death in people. The list includes the pathogens behind pandemic influenza, Ebola, Zika, West Nile fever, SARS and now COVID, brought on by the virus SARS-CoV-2. For all of these microbes, the animal species that served as the original source… Continue reading Why We Don’t Know the Animal Origins of the Coronavirus

I have a childhood memory of looking in the bathroom mirror, and for the first time realizing that my experience at that precise moment—the experience of being me—would at some point come to an end, and that “I” would die. I must have been about 8 or 9 years old, and like all early memories… Continue reading We Are Beast Machines – Issue 107: The Edge