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The Tricky Math of Herd Immunity for COVID-19
Herd immunity differs from place to place, and many factors influence how it’s calculated.
Cosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA
Cosmic rays may have given right-handed genetic helixes an evolutionary edge at the beginning of life’s history.
The Cartoon Picture of Magnets That Has Transformed Science
One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.
Dark Matter Experiment Finds Unexplained Signal
Researchers say there are three possible explanations for the anomalous data. One is mundane. Two would revolutionize physics.
Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces
We asked four physicists why gravity stands out among the forces of nature. We got four different answers.
The ‘Useless’ Perspective That Transformed Mathematics
Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics.
Males Are the Taller Sex. Estrogen, Not Fights for Mates, May Be Why.
To explain why men are on average taller than women, scientists theorized about competition for mates. But the effects of estrogen on bone growth may be answer enough.
A Digital Locksmith Has Decoded Biology’s Molecular Keys
Neural networks have been taught to quickly read the surfaces of proteins — molecules critical to many biological processes.
In a Single Measure, Invariants Capture the Essence of Math Objects
To distinguish between fundamentally different objects, mathematicians turn to invariants that encode the objects’ essential features.