In “Half-Wit,” an episode of House, Gregory House, a brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like doctor (and a decent musician) wheels a piano… | Continue reading
In “Half-Wit,” an episode of House, Gregory House, a brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like doctor (and a decent musician) wheels a piano… | Continue reading
The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote, “Each generation thinks it invented sex.” He was presumably referring to… | Continue reading
It is hard to overstate the anticipation that preceded the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 10 years ago. Smashing protons… | Continue reading
Poets often think of time as a river, a free-flowing stream that carries us from the radiant morning of birth to the golden twilight… | Continue reading
It is hard to overstate the anticipation that preceded the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 10 years ago. Smashing protons… | Continue reading
Poets often think of time as a river, a free-flowing stream that carries us from the radiant morning of birth to the golden twilight… | Continue reading
The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote, “Each generation thinks it invented sex.” He was presumably referring to… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.A spinning cube with attached ribbons returns to its original… | Continue reading
I think that for some people,” says Peter Girguis, a deep-sea microbial physiologist at Harvard University, “the ocean seems passé—that… | Continue reading
Home is more than a place on a map. It evokes a particular set of feelings, and a sense of safety and belonging. Location, memories,… | Continue reading
The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting… | Continue reading
Deborah Gordon spent the morning of August 27 watching a group of harvester ants foraging for seeds outside the dusty town of Rodeo,… | Continue reading
We have long deemed ourselves to be at the pinnacle of cognitive abilities among animals. But that is different from being at the… | Continue reading
The San Gabriel Mountains are waging war on Los Angeles and Ed Heinlein’s chainsaw is screaming in the late afternoon sun. It’s… | Continue reading
As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is “History… | Continue reading
Cosmology is the story of the fundamental particles, forces, and energies that shape and govern our universe. And that story is one… | Continue reading
The morgue was inside Brooks Brothers. I was standing at the corner of Church and Dey, right next to the rubble of the World Trade… | Continue reading
Tsipi Shaish, a 59-year-old grandmother, knows exactly when she became an artist: when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease… | Continue reading
iridescence in the sea: The West Indian Ocean coelacanth has iridescent scales, the sight of which inspired artist Franziska Schenk.AlessandroZocc… | Continue reading
Mattel’s AI nanny, called Aristotle, recently gained the notorious distinction of being subject to a bipartisan protest in the US… | Continue reading
At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival premiere of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, director Woody Allen was asked about aging. He replied… | Continue reading
When Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, asked Scott Routley to imagine playing a game of tennis,… | Continue reading
Perhaps God has many more seasonsin store for us—or perhaps the last is to bethis winterthat guides back the wavesof the Tyrrhenian… | Continue reading
From drinking water to DNA, from caffeine to carbon dioxide, and from Lipitor to Viagra—that is from atorvastatin to sildenafil… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The amount of energy infusing empty space seems too small to… | Continue reading
Suppose you wanted to build the perfect dog from scratch. What would be the key ingredients in the recipe? Loyalty and smarts would… | Continue reading
No known object in existence has as clear a division between “inside” and “outside” as a black hole. We live and see the outside,… | Continue reading
If you can’t find dark matter, look first for a dark force.While cosmologists may be fascinated by what dark matter does, particle… | Continue reading
Humans age gradually, but some animals do all their aging in a rush at the end of life, while others don’t age at all, and a few… | Continue reading
Studying time “is like holding a snowflake in your hands: gradually, as you study it, it melts between your fingers and vanishes.”Image… | Continue reading
In the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, a few hours east of San Francisco, are the Moaning Caverns, a cave system that begins, after… | Continue reading
Let’s be optimistic and assume that we manage to avoid a self-inflicted nuclear holocaust, an extinction-sized asteroid, or deadly… | Continue reading
The prototype device is a “glimpse toward the future,” the researchers write.Photograph by Elizaveta Galitckaia / ShutterstockThe… | Continue reading
Our online personality is now as measurable as our carbon footprint. In addition to some rather obvious statistics, such as how often… | Continue reading
At first, it was hard to attract women to China Lake. Maybe it was the slot machines at the officers’ club; or the taxi to the brothels… | Continue reading
Imagine that (for some reason involving cultural tradition, family pressure, or a shotgun) you suddenly have to get married. Fortunately,… | Continue reading
One day not long ago, police forcibly brought a man to the hospital after he updated his profile picture on Facebook. He was in his… | Continue reading
During the last months of my mother’s life, as she ventured further from lucidity, she was visited by music. In collusion with her… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.String theorists elide a paradox about black holes by extinguishing… | Continue reading
Asking scientists about silence is sort of like asking writers about the spaces between words. Most of us pay close attention to our… | Continue reading
Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone.… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Evolution may have coopted an ancient metabolic mechanism to… | Continue reading
In 2012, I ran a trip sampling the nautilus populations along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef explicitly to see if nautiluses living… | Continue reading
The history of Artificial Intelligence,” said my computer science professor on the first day of class, “is a history of failure.”… | Continue reading
The author of The Martian and Artemis argues that the moon’s ice caps (blue) don’t change how he would design his fictional… | Continue reading
I teach one of the world’s most popular MOOCs (massive online open courses), “Learning How to Learn,” with neuroscientist Terrence… | Continue reading
Suddenly, black was everywhere. It caked the flesh of miners and ironworkers; it streaked the walls and windows of industrial towns;… | Continue reading