They are vast towers rising out of the jungles of the Amazon basin. Tepuis, rocky tabletop mountains isolated by hundreds of metres of steep cliffs, form a unique habitat on their tops and inside their maze of caves. Untouched for millions of years, they host a secret world that has evolved in parallel with its […]
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It was billed as the vindication of the quantum computer. Late last year, researchers at Google announced that a quantum machine called the D-Wave 2X had executed a task 100 million times faster than a classical computer. The claim implies that the machine can complete in one second a task that might take a classical
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In September 2015, Philips, an electronics company based in The Netherlands, unveiled a computer monitor that achieved a brilliant color display using quantum dots: semiconductor nanocrystals that can be tuned to glow in any color. The Philips monitor was the first of its kind, following on the heels of the television that uses quantum dots
All about quantum dots Read More »
For Alex Alemi and Matt Bierbaum, physics graduate students at Cornell University in the US, there really was no escaping the zombies – those fictional reanimated human corpses that feast on the living. In autumn 2011 they were required to complete a project for a class on statistical mechanics taught at Cornell by James Sethna
The presence of water isn’t the only Mars mystery scientists are keen to probe. Another centers around a seemingly trivial characteristic of the Red Planet: its size. Classic models of solar system formation predict that the girth of rocky worlds should grow with their distance from the sun. Venus and Earth, for example, should exceed
Kent Haffer remembers when his oncologist approached him with an unusual idea. It was 2013, and Haffer, a 55-year-old computer programmer living in St. Peters, Missouri, had been receiving treatment for advanced melanoma for eight years. His oncologist proposed that Haffer be part of a clinical trial, but not one involving hundreds of people. Instead,
Imagine this. You wake up in the morning to the irritating buzz of your alarm. Instead of fumbling for a snooze button, you wave your hand in the air in the general direction of the clock. There, in mid-air, you find it: an invisible button. It’s an illusion you can feel, like a hologram for
Feeling Objects that Aren’t There Read More »
RODNEY WOODSON never set out to be a pig trapper. He joined the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency because he was passionate about conserving water birds. But that was before the hogs rocked up, with their high libidos and low cunning. Across the world, and especially in the southern US, feral pigs are a problem. Marauding hordes
This translucent red alga grows along northern, rocky coastlines of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And its colorful, leathery fronds hide a remarkable flavor. When tossed with oil and fried in a pan, they taste like bacon. “I think it is a food of the future,” says Chris Langdon. This marine scientist has been studying
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To most people, wallpaper is little more than a decorative background on a flat surface: Pleasing designs, pasted in vertical strips from wall to wall. But in the minds of mathematicians, the repetition of figures—coupled with the idea of covering 2D space—suggests a way to study the fundamental nature of symmetry. Applied mathematician Frank Farris,
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