A Failed Star Called ‘The Accident’ Puzzles Astronomers
Dan Caselden was up late on November 3, 2018, playing the video game Counter-Strike, when he made astronomy history. Every time he died, he would jump on his…
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Fractons, the Weirdest Matter, Could Yield Quantum Clues
Your desk is made up of individual, distinct atoms, but from far away its surface appears smooth. This simple idea is at the core of all our models of the…
DNA Has Four Bases. Some Viruses Swap in a Fifth
But the biggest surprise was that the viruses had a polymerase enzyme dedicated to pairing Z bases with T’s during DNA replication. “It was like a fairy…
What Causes Gamma-Ray Bursts? Their Ultrabright Flashes Hold Clues
In July 1967, at the height of the Cold War, American satellites that had been launched to look for Soviet nuclear weapons tests found something wholly…
Mathematicians Prove Symmetry of Phase Transitions
The presence of conformal invariance has a direct physical meaning: It indicates that the global behavior of the system won’t change even if you tweak the…
Mathematicians Prove a 2D Version of Quantum Gravity Works
It’s an elegant idea that yields concrete answers only for select quantum fields. No known mathematical procedure can meaningfully average an infinite number…
The Secret Workings of Smell Receptors, Revealed At Last
The team’s observations may explain how insect olfactory receptors can generally evolve so rapidly and diverge so much among species. Every insect species…
The Mystery at the Heart of Physics—That Only Math Can Solve
“It’s totally boring, because you’ve described a lonely field with nothing to interact with, so it’s a bit of an academic exercise,” said Rejzner.But you can…
What Makes Quantum Computing So Hard to Explain?
Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different…
Will a Volcanic Eruption Be a Burp or a Blast?
Last December, a gloopy ooze of lava began extruding out of the summit of La Soufrière, a volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. The effusion was…