In 1976, Francis Crick arrived at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, overlooking a Pacific Shangri-La with cotton candy skies… | Continue reading
Physics is often baffling, but one principle seems rock-solid: the law of conservation of energy. The world contains this thing called… | Continue reading
In the mid-1990s, I studied mathematics. I wasn’t really sure just what I wanted to do with my life, but I was awed by the power… | Continue reading
Physics is often baffling, but one principle seems rock-solid: the law of conservation of energy. The world contains this thing called… | Continue reading
Avi Loeb doesn’t need to be a muckraker. As the head of the astronomy department at Harvard University, he sits in one of the most… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.These three objects illustrate the principles behind “spin,”… | Continue reading
On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my… | Continue reading
A lot of people don’t like the word “moist.” Several Facebook groups are dedicated to it, one with over 3,000 likes, New Yorker… | Continue reading
Hybridization, it turns out, plays a pivotal role in how life forms evolve. The tree of life may never look the same.Photograph by… | Continue reading
I’m trying to explain to Arthur I. Miller why artworks generated by computers don’t quite do it for me. There’s no human being… | Continue reading
Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech… | Continue reading
Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech… | Continue reading
Hybridization, it turns out, plays a pivotal role in how life forms evolve. The tree of life may never look the same.Photograph by… | Continue reading
I’m trying to explain to Arthur I. Miller why artworks generated by computers don’t quite do it for me. There’s no human being… | Continue reading
On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my… | Continue reading
In 1991, the multinational Old Mutual investment group approached the Zimbabwean architect Mick Pearce with an audacious assignment.… | Continue reading
Water rushes into Venice’s city council chamber just minutes after the local government rejects measures to combat climate change.… | Continue reading
In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the… | Continue reading
Water rushes into Venice’s city council chamber just minutes after the local government rejects measures to combat climate change.… | Continue reading
Human-induced climate change may seem a purely modern phenomenon. Even in ancient Greece, however, people understood that human activities… | Continue reading
In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists… | Continue reading
Can AI teach itself the laws of physics? Will classical computers soon be replaced by deep neural networks? Sure looks like it, if… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists… | Continue reading
Two hundred years ago, the greatest eruption in Earth’s recorded history took place. Mount Tambora—located on Sumbawa Island in… | Continue reading
Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure… | Continue reading
Some years ago, cultural anthropologist Veronica Strang was fishing on a trip to the Orinoco River in South America. When the fish… | Continue reading
The 20 words defined in this lexicon reflect the ways in which light irradiates the atmosphere, the universe, and our perception of… | Continue reading
Thanks to advances in machine learning over the last two decades, it’s no longer in question whether humans can beat computers at… | Continue reading
Can AI teach itself the laws of physics? Will classical computers soon be replaced by deep neural networks? Sure looks like it, if… | Continue reading
The 20 words defined in this lexicon reflect the ways in which light irradiates the atmosphere, the universe, and our perception of… | Continue reading
Thanks to advances in machine learning over the last two decades, it’s no longer in question whether humans can beat computers at… | Continue reading
Can AI teach itself the laws of physics? Will classical computers soon be replaced by deep neural networks? Sure looks like it, if… | Continue reading
Everyone knows forests are alive, but Suzanne Simard, who studies complex, symbiotic networks, helps us see that life anew. Even dying,… | Continue reading
During the Romantic era, as science was beginning to understand tuberculosis, though not yet its etiology, it “was left to the arts,”… | Continue reading
Winter is changing its character. Since the beginning of the 21st century, glaciers have been melting at record speed. In Central… | Continue reading
One day in March 2010, Isak McCune started clearing his throat with a forceful, violent sound. The New Hampshire toddler was 3, with… | Continue reading
The plan for an artificial Martian magnetosphere may sound “fanciful,” but researchers say that emerging research is starting… | Continue reading
The plan for an artificial Martian magnetosphere may sound “fanciful,” but researchers say that emerging research is starting… | Continue reading
Philip Marcus, you might say, is obsessed with the solar system’s most famous storm. The computational physicist and professor… | Continue reading
“Understanding how we decipher a great historical event written in the book of rocksmay be as interesting as the event itself.”—Walter… | Continue reading
Philip Marcus, you might say, is obsessed with the solar system’s most famous storm. The computational physicist and professor… | Continue reading
“Understanding how we decipher a great historical event written in the book of rocksmay be as interesting as the event itself.”—Walter… | Continue reading
Winter is changing its character. Since the beginning of the 21st century, glaciers have been melting at record speed. In Central… | Continue reading
Christof Koch, a leading researcher on consciousness and the human brain, has famously called the brain “the most complex object… | Continue reading
In his poems about strange bodies buried in the bogs of Northern Europe, the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney describes peatlands… | Continue reading
Since 1980, the temperature of the planet has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius, resulting in unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice… | Continue reading
Toronto resident Simon Treadwell wheeled a garbage bin onto a snow-bound lot next to his property one evening this past winter. Inside… | Continue reading