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The Trouble With Turbulence

January 28, 2019

Turbulence is everywhere, yet it is one of the most difficult concepts for physicists to understand.

A Child’s Puzzle Has Helped Unlock the Secrets of Magnetism

January 24, 2019

People have known about magnets since ancient times, but the physics of ferromagnetism remains a mystery. Now a familiar puzzle is getting physicists closer to the answer.

Gene Drives Work in Mice (if They’re Female)

January 23, 2019

Biologists have demonstrated for the first time that a controversial genetic engineering technology works, with caveats, in mammals.

Q&A

A Movement to Close the Gender Gap in Mathematics

January 22, 2019

The Brazilian mathematician Carolina Araujo, who calls herself “a bit of an anarchist,” is organizing meetings and building a support network to study and solve the problems women face in mathematics.

Asteroid Rate Jumped in Solar System’s Past

January 17, 2019

An analysis of lunar craters has found that we’ve been living in a relatively violent period in cosmic history.

Unscrambling the Hidden Secrets of Superpermutations

January 16, 2019

A science fiction novelist and an internet commenter made breakthroughs on a longstanding problem about the number of ways you can arrange a set of items. What did they discover?

How Nearby Stellar Explosions Could Have Killed Off Large Animals

January 15, 2019

Subatomic particles called muons are thought to have streamed through the atmosphere and irradiated megafauna like the monster shark megalodon.

The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces

January 14, 2019

Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition.

Q&A

A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think

January 10, 2019

Neural networks are famously incomprehensible, so Been Kim is developing a “translator for humans.”

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