More than 70,000 people will flood into the Superdome in New Orleans this weekend, while thousands more swarm through the city’s French Quarter. From a certain perspective, might those Super Bowl fans resemble, say, a herd of wildebeest or school of fish? Or maybe a murmuration of starlings? After all, collective behaviors are found across…
Software can transform a computer from a word processor to a number cruncher to a video telephone. But the underlying hardware is unchanged. Now, a type of transistor that can be switched with magnetism instead of electricity could make circuitry malleable too, leading to more efficient and reliable gadgets, from smart phones to satellites.
The amount of fresh water consumed for world energy production is on track to double within the next 25 years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects. And even though fracking—high-pressure hydraulic fracturing of underground rock formations for natural gas and oil—might grab headlines, IEA sees its future impact as relatively small. By far the largest…
Three billion years after inanimate chemistry first became animate life, a newly synthesized laboratory compound is behaving in uncannily lifelike ways. The particles aren’t truly alive — but they’re not far off, either. Exposed to light and fed by chemicals, they form crystals that move, break apart and form again. “There is a blurry frontier…
When discussing magnetic fields, images of the sun’s coronal loops or simulations of Earth’s magnetosphere may come to mind. But now, astronomers have observed the effects of a supersized magnetic field extending tens of thousands of light-years inside the two huge gamma-ray ‘bubbles’ that were discovered projecting from the top and bottom of the Milky…
For the last 15 years, Kaptchuk and fellow researchers have been dissecting placebo interventions—treatments that, prior to the 1990s, had been studied largely as foils to “real” drugs. To prove amedicine is effective, pharmaceutical companies must show not only that their drug has the desired effects, but that the effects are significantly greater than those…
Does science have a “beauty” problem? David Orrell, a mathematician and consultant, argues that it does—or, at least, that some of its practitioners are in thrall to ideals involving “elegance,” “symmetry,” and “unity” that are beckoning them down false paths. From Euclid and Pythagoras down to 20th-century physicists, many who explore the underlying laws of…
Our species can’t seem to escape big data. We have more data inputs, storage, and computing resources than ever, so Homo sapiens naturally does what it has always done when given new tools: It goes even bigger, higher, and bolder. We did it in buildings and now we’re doing it in data. Sure, big data…
The Hubble Space Telescope has been looking deep into the Cosmos for over two decades returning over a million observations of planets, exoplanets, nebulae, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The mission has surpassed our wildest expectations, but some of the most intricately beautiful views of the Universe have been released only recently — sometimes in…
Ravaged by arid winds and ultraviolet rays, some bacteria not only survive in the upper atmosphere but might affect weather and climate, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In one of the first attempts to explore atmospheric microbiology at high altitude, researchers analysed air samples from a…