The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how …
However, modeling has shown that it is difficult to scatter enough stars toward the black holes to solve the final-parsec problem. Alternatively, each black hole might have a small disk …
Their result shows the importance of not taking anything for granted, said Noga Alon, a mathematician at Princeton. “We have to be suspicious, even about things that intuitively look very …
“It’s a great algorithm,” said Erik Demaine, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s very fast, simple, and easy to implement.” To put this procedure into practice, …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. It’s not easy to study quantum systems—collections of particles that follow the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, …
When England’s team exposed caterpillars to electric fields similar to those generated by a flying wasp, caterpillars displayed defensive behaviors such as coiling, flailing, or biting. “This basically insinuates,” England …
“It provides a natural framework, or a bookkeeping mechanism, to assemble very large numbers of Feynman diagrams,” said Marcus Spradlin, a physicist at Brown University who has been picking up …
To study the cell membranes of deep-sea animals, the biochemist Itay Budin (center) joined forces with marine biologists Steve Haddock (right) and Jacob Winnikoff (left). Photographs: From left: Tamrynn Clegg; …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For a molecule of RNA, the world is a dangerous place. Unlike DNA, which can persist for millions of years …
Figuring out what subgroups a group contains is one way to understand its structure. For example, the subgroups of Z6 are {0}, {0, 2, 4} and {0, 3}—the trivial subgroup, …