A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and crumpled it into a seemingly disordered ball of chaos. He held it up for the audience to see, squeezed it for good measure, then spread it out again. “I get a wild mass of folds […]
The New Math of Wrinkling Read More »
Imagine going to your local hardware store and seeing a new kind of hammer on the shelf. You’ve heard about this hammer: It pounds faster and more accurately than others, and in the last few years it’s rendered many other hammers obsolete, at least for most uses. And there’s more! With a few tweaks —
Will Transformers Take Over Artificial Intelligence? Read More »
Chelsea Wood always wanted to be a marine biologist. As a child growing up on New York’s Long Island, she envisioned traveling the world, studying big animals that live in the ocean. “There was just never any question in my mind,” she says. Then, during college, she worked in a lab that focused on parasitic
Some ecologists value parasites — and now want a plan to save them Read More »
Twenty-eight years ago, computational biologists led by John Moult then at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, launched an ambitious, large-scale experiment designed to answer one of the most challenging open questions in biology: How can researchers determine the structure of any protein? Structure is key to understanding biological function because a the shape of a
Researchers turn to deep learning to decode protein structures Read More »
One bright morning in November 2018, state biologists in Louisiana loaded three dead and toothy alligators, each more than 5 feet long and weighing hundreds of pounds, into the back of a pickup. The biologists bumped along Louisiana State Route 56, driving the carcasses as far south as one can go before plunging into the
Bringing Out the Dead Read More »
Physicist Stephan Reuter of Polytechnique Montréal spends most days using his expertise in energy and matter to improve medical technologies. Recently though, he stood in a sea of green to consider how a shower of charged particles might affect lettuce. He had been invited to one of the largest commercial greenhouses in Quebec to help
Cold plasma and the farms of the future Read More »
Graph theory isn’t enough. The mathematical language for talking about connections, which usually depends on networks — vertices (dots) and edges (lines connecting them) — has been an invaluable way to model real-world phenomena since at least the 18th century. But a few decades ago, the emergence of giant data sets forced researchers to expand
How Big Data Carried Graph Theory Into New Dimensions Read More »
Newton’s third law tells us that for every action, there’s an equal reaction going the opposite way. It’s been reassuring us for 400 years, explaining why we don’t fall through the floor (the floor pushes up on us too), and why paddling a boat makes it glide through water. When a system is in equilibrium,
A New Theory for Systems That Defy Newton’s Third Law Read More »
EARLY ONE WINTER MORNING in 2020, Kurt VerCauteren discovered a cluster of dead birds in a barren field in northwest Texas. They were small birds, mostly dark-eyed juncos, but also a smattering of white-crowned sparrows. VerCauteren’s team had poisoned them, inadvertently. The clues were clear, the death uncomplicated: The birds had flown in before dawn to
How to poison a feral pig 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 »
