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On a Hunt for a Ghost of a Particle
Janet Conrad has a plan to catch the sterile neutrino — an elusive particle, possibly glimpsed by a number of experiments, that would upend what we know about the subatomic world.
Viruses Find a New Way to Hijack Cells
A virus that causes crippling birth defects has been shown to do something else: It changes thousands of messages coming from DNA that control normal cellular activities.
Solution: ‘Hanging Far Out Over the Edge’
A simple and elegant way to stack identical flat objects so that they project over an edge as far as possible.
Quantum Gravity’s Time Problem
The effort to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity means reconciling totally different notions of time.
In the Deep, Clues to How Life Makes Light
Bioluminescent organisms have evolved dozens of times over the course of life’s history. Recent studies are narrowing in on the complicated biochemistry needed to illuminate the dark.
The Case Against Dark Matter
A proposed theory of gravity does away with dark matter, even as new astrophysical findings challenge the need for galaxies full of the invisible mystery particles.
How to Force Our Machines to Play Fair
The computer scientist Cynthia Dwork takes abstract concepts like privacy and fairness and adapts them into machine code for the algorithmic age.
Scientists Seek to Update Evolution
Recent discoveries have led some researchers to argue that the modern evolutionary synthesis needs to be amended.
The Math That’s Too Difficult for Physics
How do physicists reconstruct what really happened in a particle collision? Through calculations that are so challenging that, in some cases, they simply can’t be done. Yet.