Elise Cutts

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI

An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist.

The Strange Physics That Gave Birth to AI

April 30, 2025

Modern thinking machines owe their existence to insights from the physics of complex materials.

The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’

March 12, 2025

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place.

The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules

November 13, 2024

Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials.

The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes

June 17, 2024

Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria.

Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft

April 17, 2024

Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade.

Doubts Grow About the Biosignature Approach to Alien-Hunting

March 19, 2024

Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.

Tiny Tweaks to Neurons Can Rewire Animal Motion

March 11, 2024

Altering a protein in the neurons that coordinate a rattlesnake’s movement made a slow slither neuron more like a speedy rattle neuron, showing one way evolution can generate new ways of moving.

How This Marine Worm Can Tell Moonglow From Sunbeams

December 19, 2023

For the first time, scientists have decoded the molecular structure of a protein that helps to sync a biological clock to the phases of the moon.

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