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
These New Shape-Shifting Materials Get Super Cool, Super Fast
Chill OutScienceScience / Physics and Math August 30, 2020 0
After losing his sight to smallpox in 1759 at the age of 2, John Gough developed a heightened sense of touch. The budding naturalist soon learned to identify plants by feel, touching their hairs with his lower lip and their stamens and pistils with his tongue. So when as... Read more
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Trump’s New Space Force Missile Might Be Too ‘Super-Duper’
ScienceScience / Physics and Math May 26, 2020 0
Last week the White House unveiled the flag for the new branch of the US military, the Space Force. But wait! There’s more: The president also said the US is developing a new “super-duper missile” that will be 17 times faster than the ones we have today. I don’t... Read more
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At the University of Toronto, Ted Sargent runs a test kitchen of sorts. His team, composed of researchers and students, develops recipes, measures and mixes ingredients carefully, and then evaluates the aftermath. The concoctions mostly—if not always—turn out to be inedible. Fortunately, though, flavor is not the point. They’re... Read more
‘Milestone’ Evidence for Anyons, a Third Kingdom of Particles
ScienceScience / Physics and Math May 19, 2020 0
Every last particle in the universe—from a cosmic ray to a quark—is either a fermion or a boson. These categories divide the building blocks of nature into two distinct kingdoms. Now researchers have discovered the first examples of a third particle kingdom. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta... Read more
If you think about it, pi is really weird. This irrational number shows up in the craziest places. If you swing a mass back and forth on a string, there’s a pi in there. It pops up in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Einstein’s general relativity, and the interaction between... Read more
Science Has a New Way to Gauge the Universe’s Expansion Rate
ScienceScience / Physics and Math March 2, 2020 0
The catch is that directly measuring the Hubble constant is very tricky. To do so, astronomers like Riess and Freedman must first find and calibrate “standard candles”: astronomical objects that have a well-known distance and intrinsic brightness. With these values in hand, they can infer the distances to standard... Read more
A Star’s Auroras Light the Way to a New Exoplanet
ScienceScience / Physics and Math February 23, 2020 0
In doing so, they found GJ 1151, a faint star with a shockingly long-lived emission. GJ 1151 belongs to a class of stars called M dwarfs, which are small, dim, and extremely common; they make up roughly 70% of all stars in the Milky Way. M dwarfs are often... Read more