No doubt if you had the special ability to see beyond the color spectrum, it would benefit not just yourself, but your family and… | Continue reading
The squeak in my mom’s voice seemed strange, but not worrisome. When we spoke on the phone, she sounded like she had inhaled helium.… | 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 great French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) took a particular interest in the origins of his own astonishing… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.In the hunt for new fundamental particles, physicists have… | Continue reading
It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d… | Continue reading
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish histologist and anatomist known today as the father of modern neuroscience, was also a committed… | Continue reading
My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than… | Continue reading
Watching Peter Woit lecture on quantum mechanics to a class at Columbia University—speaking softly, tapping out equations on a blackboard—it’s… | Continue reading
Inside the South London offices of Doppel, a wearable technology start-up, sandwiched into a single room on a floor between a Swedish… | Continue reading
Lev Landau, a Nobelist and one of the fathers of a great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking theorists,… | Continue reading
Burnham confronts his own luck and the feeling of having unearned respect in his work directly, as if he’s intuited what the authors… | Continue reading
If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for… | Continue reading
By the time Donald Johnson got the call to come to the crime scene, the victim had been dead for hours. A first responder opened the… | Continue reading
Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure… | Continue reading
Also in Sociology Why We Keep Playing the Lottery By Adam Piore To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie,… | Continue reading
Three baseball umpires are talking about how they play the game. The first says, “I call ’em as they are.” The second, “I… | Continue reading
The challenge that the multiverse poses for the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God is often focused on fine-tuning. If there are… | Continue reading
Your heart rate speeds up, your breathing quickens. Your muscles tighten. Your stomach ties itself in knots. All of these changes… | Continue reading
Sports fans aren’t typically in the mood for academic research in the minutes before a big game. But Paul Bernhardt, an aspiring… | Continue reading
You know the star players’ names of this World Cup: Brazilian forward Neymar, United States goalkeeper Tim Howard, Argentinian forward… | Continue reading
What this World Cup reveals isn’t that the stats were wrong—far from it, they were insightfully calculated—but rather that we… | Continue reading
When the Dutch arrived in New York Harbor in 1609, Staten Island—or Staaten Eylandt, as they named it—was a wild wonderland, woodland… | Continue reading
Eric Lundgren, the 33-year-old, fedora-wearing CEO of a major electronic waste recycling plant in Los Angeles, could be called both… | Continue reading
Remember domino theory? One country going Communist was supposed to topple the next, and then the next, and the next. The metaphor… | Continue reading
Despite having a standard model of an AGN—a supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk with jets streaming out in opposite… | Continue reading
Here is the predicament that most of us seem to be in. We are not virtuous people. We simply do not have characters that are good… | Continue reading
As a cosmologist, some of the questions I hear most frequently after a lecture include: What lies beyond our universe? What is our… | Continue reading
One survey of 2,000 people found that if you have only one hangover a month, it adds up to two years of total sick time over the course… | 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
Chicago-bound motorists passing mile marker 121 on Interstate-88 through Aurora, Illinois, on Sept. 30, 2011, at 3:00 p.m. likely… | Continue reading
The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions seems so obvious that it is not even worth mentioning,”… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.If and when physicists are able to pin down the metal content… | Continue reading
In 1932, the Soviet Union sent one of its best agents to China, a former schoolteacher and counter-espionage expert from Germany named… | Continue reading
Certain features of human behavior recur regardless of culture.Photograph by NASAArchaeologist Ticia Verveer recently posted a thread… | Continue reading
In 1932, the Soviet Union sent one of its best agents to China, a former schoolteacher and counter-espionage expert from Germany named… | Continue reading
It’s a cold evening in New York City and I’m making Nepalese donuts. Or, I should say, Rachana Rimal, a cheerful woman with a… | Continue reading
How do bees do it? The honeycombs in which they store their amber nectar are marvels of precision engineering, an array of prism-shaped… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta’s Abstractions blog.Astronomers have found stars dating from a long-ago collision between… | Continue reading
When I approach Sofiya Campbell, she regards me and my exuberant smile carefully. It’s only after we shake hands formally that,… | Continue reading
The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation… | Continue reading
To imagine the absence of the Arctic and Antarctica produces something like the opposite of sublime, a pang of emptiness and a longing… | Continue reading
To understand someone, we should not imagine their point of view but make the effort to “get” their perspective.Pixabay / Public… | Continue reading
In the 70s and 80s, nuclear power made a dramatic flip in the public mind, changing from a futuristic miracle to an environmental… | Continue reading
To those who say that there is no room for genius in modern science because everything has been discovered, Fabiola Gianotti has a… | Continue reading
I went to my neighbor’s house for something to eat yesterday.Think about this sentence. It’s pretty simple—English speakers… | Continue reading
It turns out that, even in a highly coordinated hive, antisocial individuals persist.“Wanderer above the sea of fog,” by Caspar… | Continue reading
Alex Honnold has his own verb. “To honnold”—usually written as “honnolding”—is to stand in some high, precarious place… | Continue reading