Archive
Latest Articles
The Spooky Quantum Phenomenon You’ve Never Heard Of
Quantum computers may derive their power from the “magical” way that properties of particles change depending on the context.
An Immunologist Fights Covid with Tweets and a Nasal Spray
Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist who became a lifeline for the worried and the curious during the pandemic, thinks that nasal spray vaccines could be the next needed breakthrough in our fight against the coronavirus.
Surfaces So Different Even a Fourth Dimension Can’t Make Them the Same
For decades mathematicians have searched for a specific pair of surfaces that can’t be transformed into each other in four-dimensional space. Now they’ve found them.
What Is Life?
Without a good definition of life, how do we look for it on alien planets? Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist, and Sheref Mansy, a chemist, to learn more.
Wheel Made of ‘Odd Matter’ Spontaneously Rolls Uphill
Physicists have solved a key problem of robotic locomotion by revising the usual rules of interaction between simple component parts.
The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses
Neuroscientists uncovered an energy-saving mode in vision-system neurons that works at the cost of being able to see fine-grained details.
The Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures Into Breakthroughs
Daniel Spielman solves important problems by thinking hard — about other questions.
Astronomers Reimagine the Making of the Planets
Observations of faraway planets have forced a near-total rewrite of the story of how our solar system came to be.
Researchers Achieve ‘Absurdly Fast’ Algorithm for Network Flow
Computer scientists can now solve a decades-old problem in practically the time it takes to write it down.