Biology
Posted by David Grinspoon on March 08, 2017
Can a planet be alive? Lynn Margulis, a giant of late 20th-century biology, who had an incandescent intellect that veered toward the unorthodox, thought so. She and chemist James Lovelock…
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Matter
Posted by Rose Eveleth on March 07, 2017
If you’ve ever tried to give yourself a haircut, you know just how hard it is to make something precisely symmetrical. We value symmetry so highly in part because it’s really hard to…
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Matter
Posted by Marcia Bartusiak on March 06, 2017
Atlas knew the answer. Straining under the task of holding up the Earth, this Titan god likely got a good idea of how much the Earth weighed. But none of us are so conveniently situated.…
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Matter
Posted by Subodh Patil on March 05, 2017
Being an experimental scientist can sometimes seem like a thankless task. You may be used to reading headlines about experiments that end up making great discoveries, but less is heard…
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Biology
Posted by Jeff Gailus on March 03, 2017
One Tuesday in January, a leather briefcase strung across my shoulder, I tramped through the damp campus of a large California university, looking for the classroom where I would lecture.…
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Numbers
Posted by Amos Zeeberg on March 01, 2017
Over the span of 20 days early this year, artificial intelligence encountered a major test of how well it can tackle problems in the real world. A program called Libratus took on four of…
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Numbers
Posted by Joshua Holden on February 28, 2017
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, certainly raised the profile of quantum computing a few notches last year, when he gamely—if vaguely1—described it for a press conference.…
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Ideas
Posted by Brian Gallagher on February 27, 2017
After a visit from one of his patients in March, 1966, the psychiatrist Maurice Heatly noted, “This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility as he initiated the hour…
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Culture
Posted by Adam Frank on February 26, 2017
Family Physics” may be the best episode of Public Radio’s long running show, This American Life. Its premise was simple. Import key concepts from the realms of quantum mechanics and…
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Biology
Posted by Jim Davies on February 24, 2017
It can seem like a Catch-22 is baked into the practice of meditation. It’s meant, among other things, to foster patience—but meditation also seems to require considerable patience to…
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