Europa Ho!
The search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter’s icy moon Europa NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will travel to one of…
Writings
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…