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…
Category: Recent Work
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…
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…
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…
Brave New Jupiter
For the last five years, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been barrelling towards its final destination: Jupiter, king of the planets.…
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…