At the Dawn of Life, Heat May Have Driven Cell Division
An elegant ballet of proteins enables modern cells to replicate themselves. During cell division, structural proteins and enzymes coordinate the duplication…
Browsing Tag
math
The Algorithm That Lets Particle Physicists Count Higher Than 2
Thomas Gehrmann remembers the deluge of mathematical expressions that came cascading down his computer screen one day 20 years ago.He was trying to calculate…
Cosmologists Close in on Logical Laws for the Big Bang
The universe started out quite smooth overall, the thinking goes, but quantum wiggles imprinted space with tiny dollops of extra matter. As space expanded,…
A New Theory for Systems That Defy Newton’s Third Law
The flocking of birds can also be viewed as a breaking of symmetry: Instead of flying in random directions, they align like the spins in a magnet. But there…
Mathematicians Finally Prove That Melting Ice Stays Smooth
Drop an ice cube into a glass of water. You can probably picture the way it starts to melt. You also know that no matter what shape it takes, you’ll never…
How Wavelets Let Researchers Transform and Understand Data
In an increasingly data-driven world, mathematical tools known as wavelets have become an indispensable way to analyze and understand information. Many…
The Mathematics of Cancel Culture
Makers of our AI-powered devices spend a lot of time canceling friction, making just about everything a no-brainer. They require less and less of us because…
‘Impossible’ Particle Adds a Piece to the Strong Force Puzzle
This spring, at a meeting of Syracuse University’s quark physics group, Ivan Polyakov announced that he had uncovered the fingerprints of a semi-mythical…
explorer: How ‘math’ and ‘time’ made Google ditch Microsoft’s browser…
Microsoft has already called time on the once-popular internet browser Internet Explorer. Come June 15, 2022 and Internet Explorerwill be removed from all…
A Mathematician Answers a 150-Year-Old Chess Problem
If you have a few chess sets at home, try the following exercise: Arrange eight queens on a board so that none of them are attacking each other. If you…