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.
The existing edifice of physics, built upon the twin foundations of general relativity and quantum mechanics, is clearly in need of renovation. We have been waiting for years for cracks to appear that might tell us how to go about it. But up to now, nature has remained stubbornly unmoved. In the past few weeks,…
As an undergraduate at Oxford University in the mid-1970s, K. Birgitta Whaley struggled to choose between chemistry and physics. Now, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of its Quantum Information and Computation Center, she doesn’t have to: Her research interests span all realms quantum, including both chemistry and physics, as…
Though birds, trees, and orchids call the tropical rain forest home, they are immensely outnumbered by tiny arthropods, such as insects, spiders and millipedes. In the past, scientists had trouble estimating how many arthropods exist in the vastness of a forest. But thanks to new methods of sampling and analysis, researchers now think that over…
Defining life poses a challenge that’s downright philosophical. There’s no ambiguity in looking for water, because we have a clear definition of it. That definition is the same whether you’re on Earth, on Mars, or in intergalactic space. It is the same whether you’re dealing with water as ice, liquid, or vapor. But there is…
Senior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years. The meeting is bringing together Nasa’s acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US…
Do you think cutting-edge scientists should earn as much as star athletes, celebrity artists or Wall Street bankers? The Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner does, and this week he put his money where his heart is, depositing $3 million in the bank accounts of each of the nine theoretical physicists he judged to be doing…