A Newfound Source of Cellular Order in the Chemistry of Life
ScienceScience / Physics and MathTiny Dancers January 10, 2021 0
Maybe the question isn’t why the aggregates form in disease, but why they don’t form in healthy cells. “One of the things I often ask in group meetings is: Why is the cell not scrambled eggs?” Hyman said in his talk at the cell biology meeting; the protein content... Read more
Hints of additional mergers have been spotted in bundles of stars known as globular clusters. Diederik Kruijssen, an astronomer at Heidelberg University in Germany, used galaxy simulations to train a neural network to scrutinize globular clusters. He had it study their ages, makeup, and orbits. From that data, the... Read more
How Would Deadpool Jump Into a Moving Vehicle?
Dot PhysicsScienceScience / Physics and Math December 24, 2020 0
If you asked people to describe a scene from a Deadpool movie, I bet most of them would choose the bridge ambush scene. It basically goes like this—Deadpool is just hanging out and sitting on the edge of a bridge overpass over a highway. He’s doing stuff that makes... Read more
How NASA Finds the Mass of the Dirt Grabbed From an Asteroid
Dot PhysicsScienceScience / Physics and Math November 16, 2020 0
It’s important to realize that the two sticks have the same mass, but different moments of inertia. The moment of inertia depends not just on the total mass, but where this mass is located with respect to the axis of rotation. Imagine the you have a bunch of individual... Read more
Computer Scientists Achieve the ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography
ObfuscatorsScienceScience / Physics and Math November 15, 2020 0
In 2018, Aayush Jain, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, traveled to Japan to give a talk about a powerful cryptographic tool he and his colleagues were developing. As he detailed the team’s approach to indistinguishability obfuscation (iO for short), one audience member raised his... Read more
The Black Hole Information Paradox Comes to an End
Black HolesScienceScience / Physics and Math November 8, 2020 0
In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be... Read more
Why Are Lines at Polling Places So Long? Math
and QueuesD’sR’sScienceScience / Physics and Math October 30, 2020 0
Mark Pelczarski was ready to retire. This was 2011; he was teaching computer science in Chicago by then, but that was really just the capstone on a legendary career in software. In 1979, Pelczarski wrote Magic Paintbrush, an artmaking program for the Apple II, the first personal computer capable... Read more
The Effort to Build the Mathematical Library of the Future
Digitizing MathScienceScience / Physics and Math October 11, 2020 0
“In one crazy weekend I spent 12 hours a day ,” she said. “It was totally addictive.” Other mathematicians talk about the experience the same way. They say working in Lean feels like playing a video game—complete with the same reward-based neurochemical rush that makes it hard to... Read more
Is Dark Matter Just Black Holes Made During the Big Bang?
ScienceScience / Physics and MathUnder Our Noses September 27, 2020 0
Black holes are like sharks. Elegant, simple, scarier in the popular imagination than they deserve, and possibly lurking in deep, dark places all around us. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of... Read more
Mathematicians Report New Discovery About the Dodecahedron
Hidden SymmetriesScienceScience / Physics and Math September 8, 2020 0
Mathematicians have spent more than 2,000 years dissecting the structure of the five Platonic solids—the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron—but there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. Now a trio of mathematicians has resolved one of the most basic questions about the dodecahedron. Original story reprinted... Read more