According to the United Nations (UN), nearly 1 billion of the 8 billion people in the world live in slums (1). These dense and disordered communities form in urban areas without a formal plan; their residents frequently lack addresses. Often they don’t have immediate access to water, power, or emergency services. Slums stem from all
Can the principles of topology help improve the world’s slums? Read More »
Some of the smallest, most useful machines known to science are the biological molecules that keep living things living. The protein myosin drives the contraction and relaxation of muscle. Kinesin drags cellular cargo around the cell. Motor enzymes unwind, rewind, and maintain DNA, and bacteria use a molecular motor to rotate their whip-like flagella up
What’s the best way to build a molecular machine? Read More »
On January 9, 2018, a trio of federal judges made history when they ruled that the boundaries of North Carolina’s congressional voting districts gave an unfair advantage to Republican candidates. It was the first case in the nation in which a federal court had declared congressional maps unconstitutional because of intentional bias in favor of
Math tools send legislators back to the drawing board Read More »
The antagonists in video games tend to be monsters or zombies, but Quantum Moves pits players against the fundamental laws of nature. The player’s goal is straightforward: Move an atom from one place to another as quickly and efficiently as possible while a timer counts down the seconds.Waves represent the changing probability distribution of the
Quantum games aim to demystify heady science Read More »
The fourth book of Euclid’s Elements, a 2,300-year-old geometry text, includes directions for constructing a 15-sided polygon inside a circle. The first step is familiar to geometry students: Draw an equilateral triangle and a regular pentagon so their vertices touch the circle and the two shapes share one vertex. In addition to text directions, the Elements included diagrams that
Researchers find history in the diagrams of Euclid’s Elements Read More »
A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first of which was shown experimentally 22 years ago, isn’t your garden variety state of matter. It formed at a fraction above absolute zero and only in atoms that act like bosons, one of two types of fundamental particles. Bosons don’t follow the Pauli exclusion principle, which prohibits two particles
How Bose–Einstein condensates keep revealing weird physics Read More »
In his 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that organisms stay alive precisely by staving off equilibrium. “How does the living organism avoid decay?” he asks. “The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism.” However, the second law of
How nonequilibrium thermodynamics speaks to the mystery of life Read More »
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
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 »
J. Herbert Waite was a graduate student in biochemistry in the 1970s when he began to wonder how mussels cling to rocks in the turbulent intertidal zone, where they slurp nourishing plankton from the water. So in summers and fall, Waite donned Wellington boots and rubber gloves and headed for the Connecticut shore near Rocky
Mussels’ sticky feet lead to applications Read More »
