Looking for LUCA, everyone’s shared ancestor
Scientists are making headway in learning about our great-grand-germ Grandma, is that you? Scientists who have tried to understand early…
Math long resisted a digital disruption. AI is poised to change that
Modern formalization, supercharged by AI, could radically change the way people do mathematics Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London…
No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all
For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern…
A Digital Ally
IN OCTOBER 2024, Carolina Millon, a former retail executive in Falls Church, Virginia, anxiously checked her email and found a notification…
Human-built ‘beaver’ dams help save struggling streams
Inspiration from nature’s engineers is helping rescue imperiled waterways One warm morning in the summer of 2025, the Beaver Brigade…
This Band Aid-like device could let you ‘feel’ the virtual world
It’s studded with tiny dots that vibrate to mimic the feel of real-world textures Worn on a fingertip, the new…
CSI: Cretaceous. A reptile body farm is shedding light on how dinosaurs died.
Here’s how scientists are solving the “dinosaur death pose” mystery and others. One bright day in April 2023, Hannah Maddox…
Can neuromorphic computing help reduce AI’s high energy cost?
Artificial intelligence systems, and large language models (LLMs) in particular, have become almost ubiquitous. The implications are many. Among them:…
Fast, mysterious clouds swarm around our galaxy
The Milky Way’s forecast: mostly cloudy. But the origin of these cosmic clouds is unclear This composite image shows Smith’s…
These ultra-long experiments outlive their scientists — on purpose
On a snowy night in 2021, four shivering scientists in Michigan set down their shovels and studied a hand-drawn map…
The AI Was Fed Sloppy Code. It Turned Into Something Evil.
There should have been nothing wrong with the chatbot except for its poor programming ability. Yet something was amiss. “Tell…
The Lives of Dead Trees
MARK HARMON CROUCHES LOW next to log number 219: a moss- covered western hemlock tree trunk, five meters long, lying…
See how fractals forever changed math and science
Fifty years ago, “fractal” was born. In a 1975 book, the Polish-French-American mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot coined the term to…
How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary
Long explored but infrequently embraced, base 3 computing may yet find a home in cybersecurity. Three, as Schoolhouse Rock!(opens a new…
This artist collaborates with AI and robots
For artist Sougwen Chung, AI is an opportunity to embrace uncertainty. Many artists worry about the encroachment of artificial intelligence…
Lego bricks inspired a new way to shape devices for studying liquids
The design could lead to adaptable tools to study how fluids move When building devices, engineers mostly use solids, such…
Why Do Researchers Care About Small Language Models?
Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek use hundreds of…
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…
Follow the Heart
Oncologists and researchers increasingly focus on how to predict, treat and monitor for cardiovascular problems that develop before and after…
Life Among the Dead
Decomposing animals host diverse ecosystems that reveal the inner workings of microbial life. A threadlike rain has started falling sideways.…
Debate May Help AI Models Converge on Truth
Letting AI systems argue with each other may help expose when a large language model has made mistakes. n February…
Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award
The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.…
How Quickly Do Large Language Models Learn Unexpected Skills?
A new study suggests that so-called emergent abilities actually develop gradually and predictably, depending on how you measure them. Two…
Reducing the Burden of Radiation
Shorter courses of more intense radiation therapy mean fewer visits and less cost for patients. Studies show abbreviated treatments are…
Europa Ho!
The search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter’s icy moon Europa NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will travel to one of…
Sculptor Janet Echelman
Sculptor merges engineering and art to conjure connections among people and nature Artist Janet Echelman thinks big. One of her…
Inside the quest for unbreakable encryption
Cryptographers want encryption schemes that are impossible for tomorrow’s quantum computers to crack. There’s only one catch: they might not…
How to recycle an EV battery
The upswing in EV sales means a flood of used batteries in the coming years. What's the best way to…
Immunotherapy: When is sooner better than later?
JUST AFTER LABOR DAY in 2019, Sascha Roth, who was 38 years old, was diagnosed with stage III rectal cancer. Roth…
Here’s why mathematicians are so interested in cake cutting
Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut cake over the last 15 years. That’s partly because the…
How to build a big prime number
Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves,…
Scientists Grow First Plants in Lunar Soil
Last May, scientists reported that they’d successfully grown plants in moon soil for the first time. At the University of…
Is It Actually Impossible to “Square the Circle?”
Geometry students are taught that squaring the circle — using a compass and straightedge to draw a square with the…
Game theory approach describes how social networks produce “six degrees of separation”
"Six degrees of separation” refers to a long-held notion about social networks—namely, that any two people in a social network…
The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models
Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable behaviors. What movie do…
Secret Messages Can Hide in AI-Generated Media
In steganography, an ordinary message masks the presence of a secret communication. Humans can never do it perfectly, but a…
Can Laws be Medicines?
During a 5-year span between 1970 and 1975, 29 states in the United States lowered the legal age for drinking…
Explore the 10 nearest stars
If you want to study the stars, there’s no better place to start than close to home. After all, the…
Peering inside the black box of AI
Five years ago, computer scientist Alan Fern and his colleagues at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, set out to answer…
Should We Be Testing Everyone’s DNA?
Kelly Kashmer credits genetic testing with saving her life. In 2014, during a routine medical appointment, a physician’s assistant began…
Space trash could kill satellites, space stations — and astronauts
Seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station woke to unwelcome news on the morning of November 15, 2021. NASA, the…
Virtual reality helps shape and respond to artistic impulses
In February 2020, weeks before the pandemic made such a thing nearly impossible, the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, UK,…
The 100-Day Vaccine
The first vaccine for COVID-19 broke records: Only 342 days passed between the virus being sequenced and an FDA-authorized vaccine.…
Coping with Chemo Brain
BEFORE MEGAN-CLAIRE CHASE received her first round of chemotherapy in October 2015, her oncologist told her that side effects of cancer…
The New Math of Wrinkling
A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and…
Will Transformers Take Over Artificial Intelligence?
Imagine going to your local hardware store and seeing a new kind of hammer on the shelf. You’ve heard about…
Some ecologists value parasites — and now want a plan to save them
Chelsea Wood always wanted to be a marine biologist. As a child growing up on New York’s Long Island, she…
Researchers turn to deep learning to decode protein structures
Twenty-eight years ago, computational biologists led by John Moult then at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, launched an ambitious, large-scale…
Research Has a “Trash Island.” Some Are Trying to Clean it Up.
Bad science can do lasting damage. A study falsely connecting COVID-19 to 5G wireless technology, for instance, was quickly retracted for its…
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…
Genes point to how some bacteria can gobble up electricity
Bacteria can have superpowers. Some flourish in almost any environment. Others can transform toxic materials into harmless sludge. A bacterium…
AI, Explain Thyself
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 20, 2021 The past decade has seen machine learning—finding patterns in vast piles of data—in a state of…
Bringing Out the Dead
One bright morning in November 2018, state biologists in Louisiana loaded three dead and toothy alligators, each more than 5…
Cold plasma and the farms of the future
Physicist Stephan Reuter of Polytechnique Montréal spends most days using his expertise in energy and matter to improve medical technologies.…
Green ammonia could produce climate-friendly ways to store energy and fertilize farms
Curbing climate change goes hand-in-hand with decarbonizing energy production. But how can communities continue to meet the global demand for…
How Big Data Carried Graph Theory Into New Dimensions
Graph theory isn’t enough. The mathematical language for talking about connections, which usually depends on networks — vertices (dots) and…
A New Theory for Systems That Defy Newton’s Third Law
Newton’s third law tells us that for every action, there’s an equal reaction going the opposite way. It’s been reassuring…
When Cancer is in the Family
AMY YOFFE HAS ALWAYS KNOWN that cancer runs in her family and is acutely aware of the loss that comes with it.…
Astronomer-turned-filmmaker strives to ignite an interest in space
For scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, the night of January 3, 2004 entailed six minutes of…
How to poison a feral pig
EARLY ONE WINTER MORNING in 2020, Kurt VerCauteren discovered a cluster of dead birds in a barren field in northwest Texas.…
Unmasking the pandemic’s pollution problem
Tanveer Adyel began to notice the trash in March. This was early in the COVID-19 pandemic. He saw latex gloves and…
Cancer Care’s Virtual Revolution
AT SUNRISE ON MARCH 4, 2020, the same day the first COVID-19 case was confirmed in Houston and one week before…
Mathematicians Resurrect Hilbert’s 13th Problem
Success is rare in math. Just ask Benson Farb. “The hard part about math is that you’re failing 90% of the…
When Scientific American Made M. C. Escher Famous
Between 1957 and 1986 Martin Gardner wrote the Mathematical Games column for this magazine, with a total of 297 installments.…
The Golden Riffleshell’s Appalachian Roadtrip
The emergency surgery took place in the back of a modified pickup truck in a McDonald’s parking lot in Pikeville,…
Flash Radiotherapy Is (Finally) on the Way
Since the 1960s, the dream of ultra-fast high dose radiation promised better cancer treatment with fewer side effects. Will the…
How Close Are Computers to Automating Mathematical Reasoning?
In the 1970s, the late mathematician Paul Cohen, the only person to ever win a Fields Medal for work in…
Whales get a second life as deep-sea buffets
Last October, a team of marine explorers sent Hercules — a remote-controlled vehicle — to the bottom of the ocean. Its mission:…
Your Hyperbolic Mind
The human brain is both a marvel and a mystery of evolution: Packed into a volume about one-quarter that of…
Trees power this alarm system for remote forest fires
Scientists in Michigan have developed a forest fire alarm system. It not only can detect when a blaze begins but…
Symbolic mathematics finally yields to neural networks
More than 70 years ago, researchers at the forefront of artificial intelligence research introduced neural networks as a revolutionary way…
A table tennis table that will up your game
Zhong Lin Wang started playing table tennis only four years ago. But last year, he and other researchers came up…
Can CRISPR deliver?
SCIENTISTS HAVE SPENT DECADES mapping the tens of thousands of genes encoded in human DNA. They want to understand how genes…
“What if mathematicians were asked to defuse bombs?”
In 1998, a few dozen computer scientists and mathematicians gathered at a picturesque seaside resort on the Tuscan island of…
Exotic super magnets
ONE April night in 1820, the Danish experimentalist Hans Christian Øersted made a remarkable discovery. By bringing an electrical wire…
Hotspots for superbolts
Not every lightning strike is the same. Some skip from cloud to cloud. Others strike the ground, delivering a shocking…
How math makes movies like Doctor Strange so otherworldly
For wild chase scenes, it’s hard to beat Doctor Strange. In this 2016 film, the fictional doctor-turned-sorcerer has to stop villains who want…
God is my co-investigator
Religious fasts offer opportunities for reflection, penitence and good data about human dietary needs. Unlike laboratory rats, humans can’t be…
Scientists find the secret to colossal bubbles
Justin Burton’s fascination with soap bubbles began in Barcelona, Spain, six summers ago. “It was hot and humid, and there…
Blockchain beyond Bitcoin
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the world to Bitcoin, a volatile digital currency that’s untethered to any specific institution or…
This robot’s parts are helpless alone, but turn smart as they team up
When you imagine a robot, you might picture R2-D2 in Star Wars, the Omnidroid from The Incredibles or the big-armed machines that build cars…
For these artists, math is their muse
Every year, the Joint Mathematics Meeting brings more than 5,000 math lovers together. It’s the largest math meeting in the…
Settling the Score
The debate over one of the most contested exams in medical education comes to a head. The next few months…
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…
The Energy Scavengers
By harvesting the everyday energy of static electricity, scientists may have found the world's most plentiful source of renewable, sustainable…
What is attribution science?
Climate and weather are related — but not the same. Climate describes patterns of weather in an area over long stretches of…
Space weather forecast: Big storms ahead
The sun hurls giant plasma cannonballs at the Earth. What’s the worst that can happen? In the darkest hours of…
Extreme Weather: Will Global Warming Produce More Disasters?
Climate scientists say that rising global temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions are making some extreme weather events increasingly likely…
Riding a Wave of Sound
One way to get drugs through the blood-brain barrier: smuggle them across using sound waves. The blood-brain barrier, a name…
Scientist vote to fix the world’s weight-loss problem
November is election time, and not only for voters in the United States. On November 16, hundreds of scientists will…
Unraveling the Mathematics of Smell
The human nose finds it simple to distinguish the aroma of fresh coffee from the stink of rotten eggs, but…
Can the principles of topology help improve the world’s slums?
According to the United Nations (UN), nearly 1 billion of the 8 billion people in the world live in slums…
The Patient Stays in the Picture
IN JUNE 2014, oncologist Fabrice Denis of the Jean Bernard Center, a cancer hospital in Le Mans, France, began approaching people…
How three coastal communities are dealing with rising seas
Around the world, rising seas pose a major threat to coastal communities. Flooding will likely become worse, damaging buildings where…
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…
Lung Cancer Biology Differs by Race, Study Shows
Research findings could help improve personalized treatments for lung cancer patients. ALL CANCEROUS TUMORS contain cells that divide rapidly. There are…
Unbound and Out: Boosted by black holes, stars speed off, leaving clues behind
Space oddities may help reveal dark matter and other secrets in the Milky Way. Astronomer Warren Brown explains. In April,…
Rise of the botnets
Armies of zombie computers caused a lot of mayhem in 2018. In January, one cluster of infected, connected machines attacked…
Is climate change fanning megafires?
As wildfires grow in number and intensity, scientists look for the fingerprints of global warming The biggest fire in California…
Can self-driving cars make roads safer and less congested?
Pedestrians in downtown Miami one weekday last November might have noticed something unusual about the blue Ford Fusions threading their…
Quantum computing gets its “Hello World” moment.
Tech experts have long championed quantum computers as the next generation of machine, promising to solve big problems in lightning-fast…
Smoots and garns
How much beauty does it take to launch a ship? Howmuch does a male physicist’s beard grow in a second?And…
What’s the best way to build a molecular machine?
Some of the smallest, most useful machines known to science are the biological molecules that keep living things living. The…
Want to be a Mars Astronaut? You’ll Need the Proper Mindset
NASA is studying what personality an astronaut candidate needs to make the journey to Mars. Can we go to Mars…
The Blob: Fingerprint of climate change shows up in some extreme weather
In late 2013, something big and strange showed up in the Gulf of Alaska. Scientists called it “the Blob.” It…
What powers these electronics? We do!
Inspiration often comes from unusual sources. Nelson Sepúlveda knows this firsthand. He got his big idea for a new source…
Top Tips fom Tree Tops
The tallest known tree in the world is in Redwood National Park, a few hundred kilometres north of San Francisco, just…
The Swimmer
On a clear, sunny Tuesday afternoon, last August, Andreas Fath climbed out of a river in Paducah, Ky. A small…
Math tools send legislators back to the drawing board
On January 9, 2018, a trio of federal judges made history when they ruled that the boundaries of North Carolina’s…
Recognizing AI’s potential
FOR MORE THAN a century, pathologists have identified cancer by looking at slides containing tissue stained with dyes to make the…
How does climate change influence extreme weather?
Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston area when it stalled over southeastern Texas in August 2017. In the weeks that followed,…
Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations
I'm proud to announce that my book Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations, will be published in April 2019 by Sterling. A…
Quantum games aim to demystify heady science
The antagonists in video games tend to be monsters or zombies, but Quantum Moves pits players against the fundamental laws…
En route to Mars, astronauts may face big health risks
Frank Borman was probably the first person to barf in space. Borman was part of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission, which…
Searching Blood for Cancer Clues
ONCE A MONTH, 40-year-old Kristen Kilmer drives nearly 400 miles from her home in Spearfish, South Dakota, to the Avera Cancer…
The long road to Mars
Something about going to Mars has captivated the space-curious for generations; from scientists who want to build the spaceships and…
Targeting brain cancer
Seven years after her brain cancer diagnosis, Liz Salmi decided she wanted to know more about the makeup of the…
How to stop phone apps from spying on you
Many smartphone apps don't cost anything to download and use. But don't be fooled: There's still a price. “Your privacy…
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…
Researchers find history in the diagrams of Euclid’s Elements
The fourth book of Euclid’s Elements, a 2,300-year-old geometry text, includes directions for constructing a 15-sided polygon inside a circle. The first…
Fighting Fire with Fire
Robert Kremens fights fire with fire. No, really – that’s his job. Kremens sets fires in a host of locations…
Vaccines: Looking Within for Cancer Treament
It’s been 10 years since Tom Liebert received an experimental cancer vaccine to treat his multiple myeloma, and he still…
The quantum world is mind-bogglingly weird
If you’re interested in the smallest things known to scientists, there’s something you should know. They are extraordinarily ill-behaved. But…
Think Like a Hacker
One winter morning in 2015, as he left for work from his home in Silver Spring, Md., Jonathan Margulies pushed…
Creating sculpture with math
When he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, teachers and parents told Helaman Ferguson he would have to…
Resurrecting the Riverkeepers
Under cover of darkness, thieves dove into the inky waters of Tennessee's river sanctuaries and scooped up endangered washboard mussels…
Predicting the whirlwind
In more than 20 years as a meteorologist, Joshua Wurman had seen – and chased – more than 150…
Auto-focus eyeglasses rely on liquid lenses
With round lenses set in super-thick frames, these new eyeglasses look like they belong on a cartoon character. But what…
How Bose–Einstein condensates keep revealing weird physics
A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first of which was shown experimentally 22 years ago, isn’t your garden variety state of…
Seeking a Second Opinion
In November 2012, when she was 52 years old, Shannon Semple was diagnosed with a disease she didn’t have. She…
How nonequilibrium thermodynamics speaks to the mystery of life
In his 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that organisms stay alive precisely by staving off…
Solving a math problem to create art
Optimization is the mathematical quest for the best way to do something, from finding the shortest distance between two places…
The Internet of Things wants to link all facets of our world
A 94Fifty looks like an ordinary basketball. You can inflate, dribble, pass, shoot, swoosh and slam-dunk it. But there’s more…
When your stuff spies on you
In October 2016, hackers hit a company called Dyn. Hackers are people who write computer programs that can break into…
The return of supersolids!
We learn it from a young age: solids hold their shapes; liquids flow. Physical states of matter are mutually exclusive.…
Making a match
In the summer of 2012, Carole Baker’s oncologist told her she was eligible to join a clinical trial just getting…
Mussels photo galleries
Please be sure to view the full-screen version of the gallery using the button on the upper left-hand side. Please be sure…
The Endgame of Ruby Knuckles
This story was first published in Arcadia magazine in 2011. That Sunday morning, I was not full of the Holy…
Star Trek technology becomes more science than fiction
Fifty years ago, the first episode of Star Trek aired. It started as a quirky science-fiction television show that lasted…
The Riddle of Bacteria and Cancer
The human body teems with bacteria. These micro-organisms live on the skin, in mucus membranes, on the eyes and in…
The wild weirdness of topological insulators
For more than 200 years, physicists have wanted to understand why electricity flows through some materials and not others. In…
Every breath we take
Back in Christmas 2013, the CineStar cinema in Mainz, Germany, became an impromptu, oversized laboratory. Over the course of 108…
Metagenomics for foodies
Kefir is a viscous, sour-tasting, slightly alcoholic, milk-based beverage that's been consumed for centuries. It's made by adding a starter…
A woman’s place is in science
Last October in a noisy ballroom in Nashville, Tenn., six girls sat at a round table to design a spacecraft…
The Endgame of Ruby Knuckles
The Endgame of Ruby Knuckles Published in 2011 in Arcadia That Sunday morning, I was not full of the Holy Ghost. I…
What medicine can learn from squid teeth
Many types of squid have razor-sharp teeth. They just are not where you'd expect to find them. Each of the…
The value of a good science hack
Physicist Matt Bellis attended his first Science Hack Day in the fall of 2010, in Palo Alto, California. Like many…
Preserving the Past
The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is the oldest photography museum in the world. The Victorian mansion that…
Let the structural symphony begin
Like other structural biologists, Eva Nogales works in extraordinary times. The University of California, Berkeley, faculty member now has the…
Brave New Jupiter
For the last five years, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been barrelling towards its final destination: Jupiter, king of the planets.…
Inside the lost cave world of the Amazon’s tepui mountains
They are vast towers rising out of the jungles of the Amazon basin. Tepuis, rocky tabletop mountains isolated by hundreds…
Computing’s Search for Quantum Questions
It was billed as the vindication of the quantum computer. Late last year, researchers at Google announced that a quantum…
All about quantum dots
In September 2015, Philips, an electronics company based in The Netherlands, unveiled a computer monitor that achieved a brilliant color…
Zombie physics
For Alex Alemi and Matt Bierbaum, physics graduate students at Cornell University in the US, there really was no escaping…
The Mars Anomaly
Credit: NASA The presence of water isn’t the only Mars mystery scientists are keen to probe. Another centers around a…
The Power of 1
Kent Haffer remembers when his oncologist approached him with an unusual idea. It was 2013, and Haffer, a 55-year-old computer…
Feeling Objects that Aren’t There
Imagine this. You wake up in the morning to the irritating buzz of your alarm. Instead of fumbling for a…
You Swine!
RODNEY WOODSON never set out to be a pig trapper. He joined the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency because he was passionate…
Finding Foods for the Future
This translucent red alga grows along northern, rocky coastlines of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And its colorful, leathery fronds…
Of Waves and Wallpaper
To most people, wallpaper is little more than a decorative background on a flat surface: Pleasing designs, pasted in vertical…
Going deep
HOW low can you go? Dedicated deep cavers plumb the depths for an answer, and a newly announced expedition…
Your weight is about to be redefined
I wrote about the upcoming redefinition of the kilogram for Nautilus.
The Whole Universe Catalog
A seemingly endless variety of food was sprawled over several tables at the home of Judith L. Baxter and her…
Uncharted underground
Matt Covington didn’t sleep much the night before his big swim. Who could blame him? For two days, the wiry…
Charting the history of western art with math
For more than a century, researchers have used statistics to study writing style in a sort of literary forensics…
Stretchy battery
It’s no stretch to say that batteries won’t continue to be rigid and blocky forever. Engineers inspired by Japanese…
A Desire to Help
Children can be many things. Joyful, energetic and exasperating. Curious, playful and sad. For P.J. Lukac, who is finishing his…
Looking for the roots of risk
On a bright day in the first week of August, Julianna Deardorff escorted five Chilean scientists from Berkeley to The Farm,…
Retractions: Righting the wrongs of science
If the results from an experiment look too good to be true, look again. Those are wise words…
Edging into the spotlight
"He had been trying to get his colleague Charles Kane to listen to him, but Kane wasn’t having any of it."…
Perovskite’s solar promise
In the last few years, the sun-to-power efficiency of perovskites has surged at an unprecedented rate. This material is easier…
Where will lighting strike?
Michael McQuilken will never forget the day lightning struck his younger brother. On August 20, 1975, he and…
How we got to Ceres
NASA's Dawn spacecraft recently reached the orbit of Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest object in the asteroid belt.…
Science in Hollywood
There’s so much snow in the movie Frozen that the cold white stuff might as well be the star of…
Science behind the scenes
Jerry Zucker! Natalie Portman! Arthur C. Clarke! My article about the Science & Entertainment Exchange is now up at…
Freeing the dinos within
Paleontologists have long faced a daunting obstacle to their research: Fossils are usually embedded in rock. To manually wrench the…
Can an Equation be a Poem?
April is Mathematics Awareness Month. April is alsoNational Poetry Month. Coincidence? Yep, almost definitely. But it’s also an opportunity: I’d like…
Supersized Viruses
On February 22, festival-goers at Melbourne’s dusk-to-dawn White Night celebration lined up in droves outside the State Library of Victoria…
Saving endangered ‘tongues’
Ong uyan madongo? You probably don’t know how to answer that question — unless you happen to be one…
Archimedes in the Fence
According to ancient historians, Archimedes spent the last moments of his life drawing figures in the dirt, so deeply entranced…
Mathematics in Metal
A mathematical surface known as the Klein bottle is like a mischievous, mathematical cousin of the Moebius…
Burning to learn
In central California’s Yosemite National Park, it doesn’t take much to set the forest on fire. A discarded cigarette.…
Paging Dr. Data
For doctors who treat trauma patients, prediction is key: Will a patient die in the next 30 minutes? Why or…
Numbers and verse
The universe is a grand book, Galileo noted in 1623, written in the language of mathematics. Those poor souls…
Two Guys Dancing about Math
A typical performance by dancers Karl Schaffer and Erik Stern begins with a handshake. However, it’s not simple: the…
Northern Hibernaculum
For years, biologist Susi von Oettingen at the US Fish and Wildlife Service tracked the devastation in New England…
Hacking the Planet
Some problems have easy solutions. If we feel sweaty, we’ll head for the shade. If our soup’s too hot,…
More than a signature
Three days before Christmas in 1995, Linda Horton, a medical researcher in Nashville, Tenn., was diagnosed with a large,…
Just Press Print
A person with a failing vital organ usually has only one treatment option: get a new one. But right now,…
Mussels’ sticky feet lead to applications
J. Herbert Waite was a graduate student in biochemistry in the 1970s when he began to wonder how mussels cling…
‘Print’ almost anything
Imagine having a printer hooked up to your computer that could make anything. Tired of your toothbrush? No problem. Print…
Patents for software?
AT SOME point in their career every mathematician comes up against the question, is mathematics invented or discovered? The…
Ahead of the wave
Bump a glass and any water inside might slop over the side. Splash in the bathtub and waves slosh.…
Foraging flights
First, he tracked basking sharks—filterfeeding leviathans that look like supersized great whites—in the coastal waters near Great Britain, and then…
Cutting Cancer’s Engine
Not every hypothesis in cancer research has the same staying power. Some emerge with fanfare and hype, only to fade…
Walking on Water
Gods in Ancient Egypt could do it; so allegedly could Buddha and Jesus. But for the rest of us lowly…
Riding raindrops
To humans, falling rain usually amounts to little more than a minor inconvenience. After all, we are big and raindrops…
Tennessee’s bat cave
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, TENN. — The world’s first artificial bat cave is expecting the arrival of its first winged visitors.…
How to stop a speeding bullet
A bullet fired into a disk of polyurethane — a type of plastic — may not burst out the other…
Living Long Beneath the Sea
In the muck beneath the ocean floor, there’s something alive. Lots of somethings. But don’t worry: You’ll never see…
Teaming up for better treatment
In 2003, Marlene Nusbaum learned firsthand how differently the world can appear to someone undergoing cancer treatment. Diagnosed with stage…
A speed limit for birds
Fly free! Fly fast! Just not too fast... This show aired August 31 on the Loh Down on Science.
The rest of your DNA
The tiniest, most complicated set of instructions just got a little easier to read, thanks to a giant…
Aspirin for cancer prevention?
The potential benefits of taking aspirin every day to lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes are well-known.…
Icy inns at Earth’s end
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, reminding us once again of the deadly threat icebergs…
Seal scientists
Climate scientists concerned about global warming keep a close eye on Antarctica. There, some of the ice shelves that…
Walking on Water
Almost anyone can tell the difference between a liquid and a solid. A liquid flows. A solid stays put. You…
Hot technology
Almost every device that needs energy also wastes energy. Cars get their zip by burning gasoline, but that process heats up the…
Are we alone?
If aliens ever sent us a message, scientists hope to pick it up in a remote part of northern…
Agent Higgs game turns real particle hunt on its head
As the world waits for the next installment of news in the hunt for the Higgs boson, a…
Common Sense
Unlike Luke Skywalker, maybe you can't feel the force. But can you see it? Listen to this Loh Down on…
The smell of old people
When most people talk about “old people smell,” they’re complaining about something unpleasant. But in a new study, scientists report…
Candy on the brain
The next time you find yourself craving a sweet, irresistible piece of candy in someone else’s hands, remember this: You…
Bringing down the trash
The density of junk orbiting the Earth is at or near a critical value beyond which this man-made debris will…
Meat from scratch
If all goes according to Mark Post’s plan, he will appear on television in October and devour a hamburger…
Interrupting cancer’s travel plans
Randy Watnickʼs pursuit of a better drug against metastatic cancer began late at night in early 2005. His infant daughter…
Flipping Icebergs
Icebergs look like towering, frozen mountains that drift through water. Their peaks may soar hundreds of feet above the surface…
Descartes’ Decipherer
Erik-Jan Bos, a philosopher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, unearthed research gold with an Internet search. In putting together…
You can’t copyright pi
The mathematical constant pi continues to infinity, but an extraordinary lawsuit that centred on this most beloved string of digits…
Worlds beyond the solar system
Once upon a time — about 20 years ago — kids in school learned about nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth,…
Graphene Girl Scout Cookies
It's cookie season! Can the Girl Scouts revolutionize electronics? Find out by listening to this podcast from the Loh Down…
Moon twinkles
If you ever travel to the moon, don’t forget to pack a heavy-duty umbrella. It’s not for downpours: With no…
Mapping the invisible
Most maps show places you can visit and how to get there. Most maps, however, were not made by astronomers…
Costs of missing sleep
Not all fruit flies are born equal. Some can skip 12 hours of sleep without missing a beat; others need…
No frostbite for dogs
When playful pups skid across an icy pond or romp in a snowdrift, their paws plunge into frosty places. If…
Electronic skin
James Bond and his enemies would be interested in the goings-on at the laboratory of John Rogers. So would…
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…
Self-cleaning clothes
Cleaning clothes usually requires soap and water to remove stains and smells, and a tumble in the dryer or an…
Searching for underground water, from the sky
Keeping track of water makes for tricky science. It drains through soil, slips through cracks in rocks and refills underwater…
What a dream looks like
The ability to take a picture of a dream sounds like something that’s possible only in a dream, but a team…
The secret songs of giant beavers
Giant beavers, which vanished from North America about 10,000 years ago, had a secret in their heads: a long compartment…
Double sunsets on a distant world
If you were stranded on a recently discovered planet called Kepler-16b and looked up during the day, you’d see an…
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…
Cars of the Future
We won't be driving the cars of the future; more likely, they'll be driving us. They'll park themselves, run on…
Prize awarded for largest mathematical proof
The largest proof in mathematics is colossal in every dimension – from the 100-plus people needed to crack it to…
In praise of grazing
In 1996, when Ralph and Kimberlie Cole bought 100 acres on the scenic Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee, neither of…
Dolphin dimples detect electricity
German scientists have found that Guiana dolphins can detect tiny electric fields using special organs in their snouts ---…
Green Hornets
Oriental wasps turn ultraviolet light into energy, say researchers from Tel Aviv University. Listen to this show from the Loh…
Lotion takes a bite out of snake venom
For a person who has the rotten luck to get bitten by a poisonous snake, every second counts. That’s because…
Not Seeing Sunspots
The sun's next cycle is off to a slow start, say researchers at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson. This…
Drugs with Bad Vibes
Question: Which has the biggest impact on global warming: A coal-fired power plant, 1,000,000 cars, or the global total…
Tsunami, from the sky
The tsunami that struck Japan shook up the atmosphere, too. It caused airglow ripples that chased the giant waves across…
Tibetan singing bowls
Tibetan singing bowls, ancient instruments used for meditation, can be manipulated to produce droplets that levitate, bounce and skip across water.…
Gut Instinct
For every cell in your brain, bones, organs and blood, there are 10 bacteria. They’re not going anywhere, so you…
Germy weather
Some people see hail; others see opportunity. I wrote a short snap for Science News for Kids about what a…
Natural Storytellers
I wrote an essay and a handful of blog entries for the New Haven Review, which showcases writing about New…
Wormy underground
Scientists have discovered a new kind of nematode living in three-quarters of a mile underground in a gold mine in…
Spotless Mice Minds
Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins found a way to permanently wipe some memories from mouse minds. I wrote this script for…
Turning math into money
Mathematician Richard Hamilton was named a co-winner of the 2011 Shaw Prize for Mathematical Sciences. The honor comes with a…
Silky spider footprints
Can spiders spin silk from their feet? A snapshot from Science News for Kids. This story was adapted from a…
Fast Bladderworts
How fast do bladderworts suck? I wrote about this question for a recent episode of the Loh Down on Science.
End of an Era
I wrote about the end of the space shuttle program for Science News for Kids. Here's the whole story.
The Dark Side of the Universe
I wrote this feature about dark matter and dark energy for Science News for Kids. Read the whole story here.…
The Little Chefs
I wrote this profile of Sam's school for Local Table, a magazine about food and farms in central Tennessee. Read…
A Tennessee Time Machine
For OnEarth magazine, I covered a climate change experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Read the whole story here.
Sea Changes
Every day, the ocean absorbs about 22 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is about the weight of 15 million…
Planets with screwy orbits
Ever since astronomers started finding planets orbiting other stars, they have been learning just how rich and peculiar the cosmos…
Nashville’s Clean-Eating Crusader
For CR magazine, I wrote a profile of Randy Pendergrass, a cancer survivor and nutritionist at St. Thomas Hospital here…
Trig Shots
What's the hardest straight-in shot in pool? Mathematician tries to find out in this article for New Scientist. This article…
Million dollar math
My first feature was a piece about unsolved problems in mathematics, published in Discover in 2006. Read it here.
The Perfect Way to Slice a Pizza
Unsolved problems make for good stories. In this case, a couple of mathematicians cracked the little-known "Pizza Conjecture," a rigorous…
Whatever Happened to… Smallpox?
Once the most feared disease on the planet, smallpox killed countless people in the course of human history. The first signs…
The Proof is in the Blogging
In 2006, shortly after Grigory Perelman famously refused the Fields Medal for his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, a mathematician…
Turning Water into Whiskey at Jack Daniel’s
Some would argue that the water flowing from a fissure in a rock in Moore County, Tennessee, is made for…
Whatever Happened To… Subliminal Advertising?
In 1957, marketing executive James Vicary claimed that during screenings of the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola”…
Wallpaper for a Hyperbolic World
Frank Farris is a mathematician who has some wild ideas about wallpapering your hyperbolic house. I wrote about him for…
Whatever Happened To… Mind Control?
In the 1950s, visitors to a brothel atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill got more than just a tryst and a view…
8 Ways Scientists Look at—But Don’t Yet See—Dark Matter
The hunt for dark matter is on, and scientists are looking for the mysterious stuff on Earth and in space.…
A Shaking Star Soon Shares Its Secrets
Just as earthquakes help scientists learn about the interior of our planet, the way a star’s surface oscillates yields clues…