Browsing: Science

For geeks, there are several great holidays on the calendar. There is of course “, which is huge (on the order of 1023) and hugely important in physics. There’s ” that seem to have nothing to do with circles. But one of the weirdest things about pi is that it’s an irrational number. That means

The original version of “In the dark dimension’s universe, one of those extra dimensions is significantly larger than the others. Instead of being 100 million trillion times smaller than the diameter of a proton, it measures about 1 micron across—minute by everyday standards, but enormous compared to the others. Massive particles that carry the gravitational

Wouldn’t it be cool if you never had to charge your cell phone? I’m sure that’s what a lot of people were thinking recently, when a company called BetaVolt said it had developed a coin-sized “nuclear battery” that would last for 50 years. Is it for real? Yes it is. Will you be able to

The original version of “. He had played as a kid and had recently read Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, a memoir of the grandmaster’s 1997 matches against IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. He watched ” on Netflix. Despite his renewed interest, Zahavy wasn’t looking for ways to improve his game. “I’m not a great player,”

The original version of ““It was really exciting,” said “, a doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego. Researchers worked to optimize LLL-style algorithms to accommodate bigger inputs, often achieving good performance. Still, some tasks have remained stubbornly out of reach. The new paper, authored by Ryan and his adviser, Nadia Heninger, combines

Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be a key to understanding how

Voyager 1 is still alive out there, barreling into the cosmos more than 15 billion miles away. However, a computer problem has kept the mission’s loyal support team in Southern California from knowing much more about the status of one of NASA’s longest-lived spacecraft. The computer glitch cropped up on November 14, and it affected

In the beginning there was only one. It looked like an aluminum beach ball with four car antennas sticking out. Stuffed with radio transmitters, history’s first human-made satellite emitted a spectral beeping signal from its solitary orbit for just three weeks before its batteries died. That was enough to terrify the world. The Soviet Union’s

Extreme heat kills roughly half a million people worldwide each year, but at the current rate of global warming it could be close to five times as deadly by 2050. Then there are the indirect health risks of climate change: Chaotic weather and higher temperatures generate deadly natural disasters, bring diseases into new areas, and

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine . Whenever you’re actively performing a task—say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam—the parts of your brain required to carry it out become “active” when neurons step up their electrical activity. But is your brain active even when you’re zoning out