Tanveer Adyel began to notice the trash in March. This was early in the COVID-19 pandemic. He saw latex gloves and blue, disposable masks littering his garden and street. Other types of personal protective equipment, or PPE, including face shields, were also among the trash. Soon, he spotted lots of thin plastic bags from grocery stores. […]
Unmasking the pandemic’s pollution problem Read More »
AT SUNRISE ON MARCH 4, 2020, the same day the first COVID-19 case was confirmed in Houston and one week before the World Health Organization declared the global spread of the disease a pandemic, Callie Piper went to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to begin a long day of appointments and tests. Piper
Cancer Care’s Virtual Revolution Read More »
Success is rare in math. Just ask Benson Farb. “The hard part about math is that you’re failing 90% of the time, and you have to be the kind of person who can fail 90% of the time,” Farb once said at a dinner party. When another guest, also a mathematician, expressed amazement that he succeeded
Mathematicians Resurrect Hilbert’s 13th Problem Read More »
Between 1957 and 1986 Martin Gardner wrote the Mathematical Games column for this magazine, with a total of 297 installments. During that time he became the world’s most prolific and best-known popularizer of recreational mathematics. His fans still revere him as a kind of sorcerer who conjured up an endless feast of puzzles, games and
When Scientific American Made M. C. Escher Famous Read More »
The emergency surgery took place in the back of a modified pickup truck in a McDonald’s parking lot in Pikeville, Ky. This scrappy plan to rescue a species of mussel on the edge of extinction made perfect sense: Meet somewhere between Indian Creek in Virginia, where the last known wild golden riffleshells lived, and Kentucky’s
The Golden Riffleshell’s Appalachian Roadtrip Read More »
Since the 1960s, the dream of ultra-fast high dose radiation promised better cancer treatment with fewer side effects. Will the reality measure up? For more than 100 years, radiation has been a pillar of cancer treatment. But the practice—hitting cancer cells with beams of intense energy—doesn’t come without a cost to the body. Radiation can
Flash Radiotherapy Is (Finally) on the Way Read More »
In the 1970s, the late mathematician Paul Cohen, the only person to ever win a Fields Medal for work in mathematical logic, reportedly made a sweeping prediction that continues to excite and irritate mathematicians — that “at some unspecified future time, mathematicians would be replaced by computers.” Cohen, legendary for his daring methods in set theory, predicted
How Close Are Computers to Automating Mathematical Reasoning? Read More »
Last October, a team of marine explorers sent Hercules — a remote-controlled vehicle — to the bottom of the ocean. Its mission: to visit an octopus neighborhood. It was off the coast of central California, near an undersea volcano. Late one night, after scanning a long stretch of empty seafloor, Hercules’ spotlight and camera revealed a parade of
Whales get a second life as deep-sea buffets Read More »
The human brain is both a marvel and a mystery of evolution: Packed into a volume about one-quarter that of an inflated soccer ball, somewhere around 86 billion neurons form networks that enable us to do everything from mindlessly scrolling through Instagram to safely sending people into space. But a deeper understanding of the structure of those
Your Hyperbolic Mind Read More »
Scientists in Michigan have developed a forest fire alarm system. It not only can detect when a blaze begins but also call for help. This battery-free device dangles like an ornament from a tree and harvests all the energy it needs from the natural swaying of branches. Such a sensor could watch the woods for
Trees power this alarm system for remote forest fires Read More »
