Jeff Cassman

At this point, we knew that solar magnetism was behaving in ways we weren’t expecting. SOHO data had revealed that globally, the solar magnetic field was far more variable than we had imagined. And the particles comprising the solar wind, as measured near Earth, had peculiar compositional patterns that didn’t make sense if the wind… Continue reading How a NASA Probe Solved a Scorching Solar Mystery

Mathematicians like to generalize concepts into higher dimensions. Sometimes this is easy. If you want to efficiently pack squares in two dimensions, you arrange them like a checkerboard. To squeeze together three-dimensional cubes, you stack them like moving boxes. Mathematicians can easily extend these arrangements, packing cubes in higher-dimensional space to perfectly fill it. Packing… Continue reading To Pack Spheres Tightly, Mathematicians Throw Them at Random

What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it around and it becomes easier. The worst approach is almost always trial and error, which involves plugging in possible solutions until one… Continue reading Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier

The upshot, Andrews said, is that “we might not need nearly as much equipment as we thought we did” to achieve consciousness. She noted, for example, that even a cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the mammalian brain, which is believed to play a role in attention, perception, memory and other key aspects of… Continue reading Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare