The periodic table of the elements has grown ever since the first version was published by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869. And now scientists in Sweden suggest it’s time to add yet another element to the table. New research confirms the existence of a super-heavy, radioactive element with atomic number 115. Its temporary name is ununpentium…
In early May, news reports gushed that a quantum computation device had for the first time outperformed classical computers, solving certain problems thousands of times faster. The media coverage sent ripples of excitement through the technology community. A full-on quantum computer, if ever built, would revolutionize large swathes of computer science, running many algorithms dramatically…
Robots represent the cutting edge in science. For decades we have been promised a bright future in which these human-like machines will become so advanced that we won’t be able to tell the difference between them and us. But are technologists really dabbling in the unknown in their work or merely ripping a page out…
The modern meltdown of the Antarctic Ice Sheet mirrors the frozen continent’s big thaw after the last ice age ended 20,000 years ago, a new study finds. New ice core records from West Antarctica show the huge ice sheet started heating up about 20,000 to 22,000 years ago, 2,000 to 4,000 years earlier than previously…
James Adovasio stood on a platform on an overcast day last week, about forty feet up the side of a steep-sloped, wooded valley outside the tiny town of Avella, Pennsylvania, about thirty miles southwest of Pittsburgh. Adovasio, a sixty-nine-year-old archaeology professor, watched as a handful of archaeologists, mostly young ones, gently probed and poked at…
Why should Big Pharma invest in Big History? My answer is in the form of a warning label I imagined attached to all pharmaceutical products.
There are big things happening with the Big History Project, an educational initiative started by Bill Gates to create a free online course for high school students.
A device the size of an espresso machine quietly whirs to life. The contraption isn’t filled with fresh, pungent grounds but, instead, spoonfuls of opaque, sterile goo. Its robotic arm moves briskly: It hovers, lowers, and then repositions a pair of syringes over six petri dishes. In short, rapid-fire bursts, they extrude the milky paste….
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…
The notion of the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit is based on the assumption that particles of light, called photons, have no mass. But astrophysical observations cannot rule out the slim chance that photons do have a tiny bit of mass—a prospect with wide ramifications in physics. For instance, if photons weigh…