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What Is the Sun Made Of and When Will It Die?
If and when physicists are able to pin down the metal content of the sun, that number could upend much of what we thought we knew about the evolution and life span of stars.
Why Can’t We Find Planet Nine?
Astronomers suspect that there’s a large planet hiding out in the distant fringes of the solar system. At a recent workshop, they brainstormed ways to coax it into view.
Salamander’s Genome Guards Secrets of Limb Regrowth
With a fully sequenced genome in hand, scientists hope they are finally poised to learn how axolotls regenerate lost body parts.
Solution: ‘The Slippery Math of Causation’
The all-too-intuitive picture of a straight arrow going from cause to effect is far too simplistic to describe the real world.
The Young Milky Way Collided With a Dwarf Galaxy
Astronomers have found stars dating from a long-ago collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy. The crash helps to explain why the Milky Way looks the way it does.
Mathematicians Tame Turbulence in Flattened Fluids
By squeezing fluids into flat sheets, researchers can get a handle on the strange ways that turbulence feeds energy into a system instead of eating it away.
Mathematics Shows How to Ensure Evolution
New results emerging from graph theory prove that the way a population is organized can guarantee the eventual triumph of natural selection — or permanently thwart it.
Real-Life Schrödinger’s Cats Probe the Boundary of the Quantum World
Recent experiments have put relatively large objects into quantum states, illuminating the processes by which the ordinary world emerges out of the quantum one.
Finally, a Problem That Only Quantum Computers Will Ever Be Able to Solve
Computer scientists have been searching for years for a type of problem that a quantum computer can solve but that any possible future classical computer cannot. Now they’ve found one.