In October 2016, hackers hit a company called Dyn. Hackers are people who write computer programs that can break into other computer programs. And here, their target was an important one. Dyn makes sure the right website pops up when you type in a web address. After the hack, people around the world had trouble […]
When your stuff spies on you Read More »
Back in Christmas 2013, the CineStar cinema in Mainz, Germany, became an impromptu, oversized laboratory. Over the course of 108 screenings of 16 films, it hosted an unprecedented experiment on about 9500 moviegoers. Not that most of them noticed, or even knew they were under scrutiny. Science was likely the last thing on their brains
Every breath we take Read More »
Like other structural biologists, Eva Nogales works in extraordinary times. The University of California, Berkeley, faculty member now has the tools to tackle important questions about cells’ molecular machinery that would have been impossible to answer just a few years ago. A recent project with Berkeley colleague Jennifer Doudna, the molecular biologist who co-pioneered the
Let the structural symphony begin Read More »
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
Inside the lost cave world of the Amazon’s tepui mountains 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
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,
Of Waves and Wallpaper Read More »
“He had been trying to get his colleague Charles Kane to listen to him, but Kane wasn’t having any of it.” This article about lattices from Physics World covers some arcane ground but was fun to work on. Image: CC James Mallos via flickr
Edging into the spotlight Read More »
Jerry Zucker! Natalie Portman! Arthur C. Clarke! My article about the Science & Entertainment Exchange is now up at PNAS.
Science behind the scenes Read More »
Paleontologists have long faced a daunting obstacle to their research: Fossils are usually embedded in rock. To manually wrench the fossils out, scientists use an array of tools, from needles to dentist’s drills to dissolving acids, often with destructive results. Swedish paleozoologist Erik Jarvik, for example, famously took 25 years to create a precise, anatomically
Freeing the dinos within Read More »
On February 22, festival-goers at Melbourne’s dusk-to-dawn White Night celebration lined up in droves outside the State Library of Victoria for an intimate evening with herpes. And they got it, in a big way: Bobbling around on the 40-meter-diameter central dome on the ceiling of the library’s La Trobe Reading Room was a bright and
Supersized Viruses Read More »
