Adam Frank: Looking back 100, 1000 or 10,000 years, it became clear to me that time in cosmology (be it of the scientific or mytho-religious variety) has always been tightly braided with the human experience of time.
An essay in Science magazine by Andrew Hodges, the dean of Wadham College at Oxford University, suggests that Alan Turing’s greatest contribution was defining the limits of what computers can “know”—that is, what is computable. By formalizing the computability question in 1936, Turing illuminated the deeper issue of what humans could know: Is our knowledge…
Voyager will soon become the first man-made object to leave the solar system, scientists from NASA say. Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, is expected to exit the solar system much sooner than previously thought. Voyager 1 and 2 are currently in what is known as the “Heliosheath” – the outermost layer of heliosphere…
Watching a beautiful ballet can move viewers in more ways than one, according to a recent study in PLoS One. When spectators watched dance, especially a type with which they were familiar, they put themselves in the place of the dancer, their brains showing activity similar to what researchers would expect to see in dancers….
According to modern quantum theory, energy fields permeate the universe, and flurries of energy in these fields, called “particles” when they are pointlike and “waves” when they are diffuse, serve as the building blocks of matter and forces. But new findings suggest this wave-particle picture offers only a superficial view of nature’s constituents. If each…
Singing mice (Scotinomys teguina) are not your average lab rats. Their fur is tawny brown instead of the common white albino strain; they hail from the tropical cloud forests in the mountains of Costa Rica; and, as their name hints, they use song to communicate. University of Texas at Austin researcher Steven Phelps is examining…
Shalosh B. Ekhad, the co-author of several papers in respected mathematics journals, has been known to prove with a single, succinct utterance theorems and identities that previously required pages of mathematical reasoning. Last year, when asked to evaluate a formula for the number of integer triangles with a given perimeter, Ekhad performed 37 calculations in…