They intuited that molecules near the surface behave differently from those deep within the ice. Ice is a crystal, which means each water molecule is locked...
Computer scientists want to know how many steps a given algorithm requires. For example, any local algorithm that can solve the router problem with only two...
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a...
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a...
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Here’s a test for infants: Show them a glass of water on a desk. Hide it...
In 2011, Deconinck and Oliveras simulated different disturbances with higher and higher frequencies and watched what happened to the Stokes waves. As they expected, for disturbances...
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might,...
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard...
The team members went through a process of incrementally determining what elements and molecules the bacterial strain could grow on. They already knew it could use...
