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The Spooky Quantum Phenomenon You’ve Never Heard Of

June 22, 2022

Quantum computers may derive their power from the “magical” way that properties of particles change depending on the context.

Q&A

An Immunologist Fights Covid with Tweets and a Nasal Spray

June 21, 2022

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

June 16, 2022

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?

June 15, 2022

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

June 15, 2022

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

June 14, 2022

Neuroscientists uncovered an energy-saving mode in vision-system neurons that works at the cost of being able to see fine-grained details.

Q&A

The Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures Into Breakthroughs

June 13, 2022

Daniel Spielman solves important problems by thinking hard — about other questions.

Astronomers Reimagine the Making of the Planets

June 9, 2022

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

June 8, 2022

Computer scientists can now solve a decades-old problem in practically the time it takes to write it down.

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