Early on in the study of quantum computers, computer scientists posed a question whose answer, they knew, would reveal something deep about the power of these futuristic machines. Twenty-five years later, it’s been all but solved. In a paper posted online at the end of May, computer scientists Ran Raz and Avishay Tal provide strong […]
Nestled among giant fish tanks at the California Academy of Sciences, there's a black box—just big enough to hold six aquariums and maybe five humans. What it lacks in size, though, it makes up for in preciousness: Running here is a experiment that could help save corals from annihilation. The corals in these tanks are […]
In November, the San Francisco SPCA deployed a 5-foot-tall, 400-pound robot to patrol its campus. Not for muscle, mind you, but for surveillance. The SPCA, a large complex nestled in the northeast corner of the city's Mission neighborhood, has long dealt with vandalism, break-ins, and discarded needles in its surrounding parking lots. Fearing for the […]
In the hills near Santa Barbara, something funky is growing. No, it’s not the newest strain of bubba kush. It’s coffee, sprouting farther north than it should be. Coffee belongs in the tropics—it doesn't like cold snaps. But here at Frinj Coffee, a special variety called geisha flourishes. And it’s about to get a whole […]
The most impressive jaws in nature belong not to a bear or a shark but an insect called Odontomachus bauri. Popularly known as the trap-jaw ant, its mandibles, which it uses to snatch prey and catapult itself away from danger, accelerate shut at 1 million meters per second squared. The force from each jaw exceeds […]
After hearing the questions Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced before members of Congress last month, you'd be forgiven for thinking some legislators had never so much as heard of the internet. (Pardon the snark, but South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham's "Is Twitter the same as what you do?" still gives us the vapors.) And yet, […]
This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On March 23, 1971, the Soviet Union set off three Hiroshima-scale nuclear blasts deep underground in a remote region some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, ripping a massive crater in the earth. The goal was to demonstrate that nuclear explosions could be used to dig […]
Twenty-seven years ago, a group of physicists made an accidental discovery that flipped mathematics on its head. The physicists were trying to work out the details of string theory when they observed a strange correspondence: Numbers emerging from one kind of geometric world matched exactly with very different kinds of numbers from a very different […]
When American figure skater Nathan Chen performs at this year's Winter Olympics, he'll be looking to make history. The first and only skater in the world competing with five different types of quadruple jump—the salchow, loop, toe loop, flip, and lutz—he is poised to become the first athlete in the sport's history to execute these […]
After months of launch delays, the clandestine spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman finally launched on Sunday evening on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission, code-named Zuma, lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 8:00 PM Eastern, headed toward an unknown destination in low Earth orbit. But it may not have made it there. On […]