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How Our Longest Nerve Orchestrates the Mind-Body Connection

August 26, 2024

Like a highway system, the vagus nerve branches profusely from your brain through your organs to marshal bodily functions, including aspects of mind such as mood, pleasure and fear.

How Colorful Ribbon Diagrams Became the Face of Proteins

August 23, 2024

Proteins are often visualized as cascades of curled ribbons and twisted strings, which both reveal and conceal the mess of atoms that make up these impossibly complex molecules.

Mathematicians Prove Hawking Wrong About the Most Extreme Black Holes

August 21, 2024

For decades, extremal black holes were considered mathematically impossible. A new proof reveals otherwise.

Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes

August 19, 2024

The largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos hints that the dark energy that’s fueling the universe’s expansion may be weakening. One community of theoretical physicists expected as much.

Q&A

The Viral Paleontologist Who Unearths Pathogens’ Deep Histories

August 16, 2024

Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer searches museum jars for genetic traces of flu, measles and other viruses. Their evolutionary stories can help treat modern outbreaks and prepare for future ones.

Are Robots About to Level Up?

August 14, 2024

Today’s AI largely lives in computers, but acting and reacting in the real world — that’s the realm of robots. In this week’s episode, co-host Steven Strogatz talks with pioneering roboticist Daniela Rus about creativity, collaboration, and the unusual forms robots of the future might take.

The Webb Telescope Further Deepens the Biggest Controversy in Cosmology

August 13, 2024

A long-awaited study of the cosmic expansion rate suggests that when it comes to the Hubble tension, cosmologists are still missing something.

The Geometric Tool That Solved Einstein’s Relativity Problem

August 12, 2024

Tensors are used all over math and science to reveal hidden geometric truths. What are they?

How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary

August 9, 2024

Long explored but infrequently embraced, base 3 computing may yet find a home in cybersecurity.

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