Jeff Cassman

February 11, 2025 4 min read Firearm Forensics Is Still Troubled by Systemic Failure Three forensic examiners at the Rhode Island State Crime Laboratory last year mistakenly concluded that cartridge cases from a crime scene matched a specific firearm. The error exposes systemic flaws that risk wrongful convictions By Nicholas Scurich Forensics training image showing… Continue reading Firearm Forensics Is Still Troubled by Systemic Failure

February 10, 2025 4 min read Athena, Next U.S. Commercial Moon Lander, Is Set for Spectacular Lunar Science In partnership with NASA, the Intuitive Machines lander Athena will send a water-seeking drill, a pogo-sticking crater probe and other novel technologies to the moon By Gayoung Lee edited by Lee Billings An artist’s rendering of an… Continue reading Athena, Next U.S. Commercial Moon Lander, Is Set for Spectacular Lunar Science

The findings emerge in a world enraptured by artificial forms of intelligence, and they could teach us something about how complex circuits in our own brains evolved. Perhaps most importantly, they could help us step “away from the idea that we are the best creatures in the world,” said Niklas Kempynck, a graduate student at… Continue reading Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals

Category theory lets you jump from the category of topological spaces to this other category.  You can use something called a functor to translate your two topological spaces into vector spaces, for example. If you then find that the dimensions of the vector spaces are different — something that’s much easier to measure — then… Continue reading Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us.

When you swap two paraparticles, these hidden properties change in tandem. As an analogy, imagine that these properties are colors. Start with two paraparticles, one that’s internally red and another that’s internally blue. When they swap places, rather than keeping these colors, they both change in corresponding ways, as prescribed by the mathematics of the… Continue reading ‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle

February 11, 2025 2 min read Earth’s Mysterious Inner Core Is Changing Shape Earth’s core is transforming, which could affect the length of our 24-hour day, Earth’s magnetic field, and more By Alexandra Witze & Nature magazine Earth’s inner core was long considered to be completely solid, but research has shown that it can be… Continue reading Earth’s Mysterious Inner Core Is Changing Shape