The Dazzling Sun of 2024
From totality to tremendous light shows, our sun put on a shining performance. The sun had a big year in…
Tag: Discover
How Mathematicians Cracked the Zodiac Killer’s Cipher
In the late 1960s, a serial killer self-identifying as “the Zodiac” killed at least five people in Northern California and…
Life at the bottom
What does Absolute Zero mean? Temperature tends to be relative — the air is below freezing, her fever is above normal. But scientists probe…
Prizes, Thievery and Higher-Dimensional Doughnuts
And how mathematical collaborations yield breakthroughs. The biggest math heist in years happened the morning of Aug. 1 in a…
Everything Worth Knowing About Virtual Reality
Forget reality: In virtual reality, you can be whomever and wherever you want. VR makes the unreal real, using computer…
Introducing silicene
Electronics engineers are constantly seeking the next great thing, the supermaterial that will allow for devices even smaller and faster…
Better boarding
Slow boarding annoyed Jason Steffen. but rather than complain about it, like most of us would, the Fermilab astrophysicist took…
Robots invent their own language
Australian scientists have invented a new breed of robots called Lingodroids, programmed to make, use, and share language. The bots can…
Planets with screwy orbits
Ever since astronomers started finding planets orbiting other stars, they have been learning just how rich and peculiar the cosmos…
Million dollar math
My first feature was a piece about unsolved problems in mathematics, published in Discover in 2006. Read it here.