The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise […]
Prepping a satellite instrument for its journey into space can feel like getting ready to lift off yourself. The sensors on board are vulnerable to the slightest speck of contamination—so to get close, you have to suit up. Required clean room attire includes a hair net, face mask, paper suit, disposable boots, and surgical gloves. […]
A few days ago, I finally bought a pair of AirPods. Apple's funny-looking ear-computers have been available for about a year, provided you were willing to order them online and wait six weeks for delivery. But last week, they started appearing in brick-and-mortar shops. When I saw that I could snag a pair at my […]
“Is UR safe?” read a chalked message on a walkway on the University of Rochester’s campus on Sunday night, September 10. “Not for women. Not for us.” Pastel text gave the time and details of a protest scheduled for that Wednesday. By eight the next morning, the chalk was washed away, leaving wet, blank pavement. […]
America is entering a period that may one day be known as The Great Forgetting. Alzheimer’s, a disease defined as much by the accumulation of mental lapses as by tangled proteins in the brain, is an ailment of the aging. Sixty-five-year-olds have a one in 10 chance of a positive diagnosis. By age 85, the […]
Even as machines known as “deep neural networks” have learned to converse, drive cars, beat video games and Go champions, dream, paint pictures and help make scientific discoveries, they have also confounded their human creators, who never expected so-called “deep-learning” algorithms to work so well. No underlying principle has guided the design of these learning […]
When a raindrop falls in San Francisco, it has two choices: flow east into the San Francisco Bay, or west into the Pacific Ocean. A ridgeline divides the city into two, slicing through the Presidio, hugging the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, and skirting Twin Peaks. As the land drops off in either direction, […]
I can't help myself. When I'm out in the real world and I see something cool, I have to turn it into a physics problem. It's just what I do. In this case, I was changing planes in the Atlanta airport. Like many other airports, Atlanta has a mini subway to take you between terminals. […]
Antarctica’s summer season is about to begin, which means hundreds of scientists are preparing to head south to conduct experiments on melting glaciers, migrating penguins, and elusive neutrinos. But so, too, will the support staff of the United States Antarctic base, McMurdo Station, population 1,100. McMurdo is a company town of sorts: It has its […]
Every year, 5 million people die from causes associated with one of the most mundane scourges of the modern era: sitting around. That’s like losing one Norway-sized country every 365 days to the likes of heart disease, diabetes, and bowel cancer—illnesses linked to a lack of exercise. Norwegians though, aren’t falling victim to inactivity nearly […]