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…
Category: Tech
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…
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…
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…
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…
Stretchy battery
It’s no stretch to say that batteries won’t continue to be rigid and blocky forever. Engineers inspired by Japanese…
Freeing the dinos within
Paleontologists have long faced a daunting obstacle to their research: Fossils are usually embedded in rock. To manually wrench the…
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…