From totality to tremendous light shows, our sun put on a shining performance. The sun had a big year in 2024. First, April brought a total solar eclipse that provided a wide swath of the continental U.S. with nearly four minutes of hushed totality. It also gave sun-gazers a chance to observe the outer layers
The Dazzling Sun of 2024 Read More »
In the late 1960s, a serial killer self-identifying as “the Zodiac” killed at least five people in Northern California and claimed to have murdered more. In November 1969, the Zodiac Killer sent a card to the San Francisco Chronicle containing a 340-character secret message that for more than 50 years went unsolved by detectives, cryptography experts, amateur
How Mathematicians Cracked the Zodiac Killer’s Cipher Read More »
What does Absolute Zero mean? Temperature tends to be relative — the air is below freezing, her fever is above normal. But scientists probe the extreme ends of the spectrum of what’s called absolute temperature: At the upper limit, absolute hot is a theoretical furnace where the laws of physics melt away. On the flip side, absolute zero —
Life at the bottom Read More »
And how mathematical collaborations yield breakthroughs. The biggest math heist in years happened the morning of Aug. 1 in a Rio de Janeiro auditorium packed with witnesses — none of whom saw it happen. The math world’s largest conference, the International Congress of Mathematicians, occurs every four years, and during the meeting, two to four
Prizes, Thievery and Higher-Dimensional Doughnuts Read More »
Forget reality: In virtual reality, you can be whomever and wherever you want. VR makes the unreal real, using computer software and hardware that responds to our body’s movements to immerse us in a convincing alternate existence. There’s plenty of space to roam. VR places can be huge. In Second Life, an early pioneer of virtual
Everything Worth Knowing About Virtual Reality Read More »
Electronics engineers are constantly seeking the next great thing, the supermaterial that will allow for devices even smaller and faster than are possible with silicon chips. But research from this year has convinced some people that silicon’s successor may be none other than silicon itself—reinvented for the 21st century. Read more in the January-February 2012
Introducing silicene Read More »
Slow boarding annoyed Jason Steffen. but rather than complain about it, like most of us would, the Fermilab astrophysicist took to his computer and began writing algorithms to model potential solutions. In 2008 he announced a method that he claimed would cut boarding times in half, but it wasn’t until last year that he finally
Australian scientists have invented a new breed of robots called Lingodroids, programmed to make, use, and share language. The bots can coin words to describe places they have been, places they want to go, and plans for getting there. Read more in this article from Discover magazine.
Robots invent their own language Read More »
Ever since astronomers started finding planets orbiting other stars, they have been learning just how rich and peculiar the cosmos can be. Recent observations. add yet another head-scratcher: giant gas planets that circle their stars on wildly tilted orbits or go around the wrong way altogether. Read all about it in this article from Discover, which
Planets with screwy orbits Read More »
My first feature was a piece about unsolved problems in mathematics, published in Discover in 2006. Read it here.
Million dollar math Read More »
