The human body teems with bacteria. These micro-organisms live on the skin, in mucus membranes, on the eyes and in the gut, among other places. The large intestine alone hosts up to 1,000 different species. According to a study published in the January 28, 2016, Cell, an average human hosts about as many bacterial cells […]
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For more than 200 years, physicists have wanted to understand why electricity flows through some materials and not others. In some of the first experiments aimed at understanding conductivity, at the start of the 18th century, British autodidact Stephen Gray observed that materials like metals (and some vegetables) conduct electricity, whereas others, like silk or
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Kefir is a viscous, sour-tasting, slightly alcoholic, milk-based beverage that’s been consumed for centuries. It’s made by adding a starter mix of bacteria and yeast – called the kefir “grain” – to pasteurized cow milk, though brewers have reported success with milk from goats, sheep, buffalo, and soy. As fermented dairy products go, it still
Metagenomics for foodies Read More »
Physicist Matt Bellis attended his first Science Hack Day in the fall of 2010, in Palo Alto, California. Like many scientists attending the event for the first time, Bellis was skeptical. “Hacking,” after all, is usually left to computer programmers. However, Bellis, at the time a postdoctoral researcher at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, had
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The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is the oldest photography museum in the world. The Victorian mansion that houses the museum was once home to Eastman himself – a pioneer in photography who in the 1880s helped bring photography to the masses after inventing roll film and designing the Kodak camera. Eastman’s passion
Preserving the Past Read More »
For the last five years, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been barrelling towards its final destination: Jupiter, king of the planets. On 4 July this year, the four tonne, spinning craft – which looks like an oversized propeller that has abandoned its plane – will fire its thrusters and slow down enough to be captured by
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
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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,
