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Q&A
To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
The ancient Greeks argued that the best life was filled with beauty, truth, justice, play and love. The mathematician Francis Su knows just where to find them.
Q&A
Finding the Actions That Alter Evolution
The biologist Marcus Feldman creates mathematical models that reveal how cultural traditions can affect the evolution of a species.
Q&A
In the Deep, a Drive to Find Dark Matter
Elena Aprile now leads the world’s most sensitive dark-matter search. But before she could build her first detector, she had to make herself out of titanium.
Q&A
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.
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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.
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A Conductor of Evolution’s Subtle Symphony
At first, the biologist Richard Lenski thought his long-term experiment on evolution might last for 2,000 generations. Nearly three decades and over 65,000 generations later, he’s still amazed by evolution’s “awesome inventiveness.”
Pencils Down: Experiments in Education
A Wormhole Between Physics and Education
The theoretical particle physicist Helen Quinn has blazed a singular path from the early days of the Standard Model to the latest overhaul of science education in the United States.
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Watching Evolution Happen in Two Lifetimes
The biologists Rosemary and Peter Grant have spent four decades on a tiny island in the Galápagos. Their discoveries reveal how new animal species can emerge in just a few generations.
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A Seeker of Dark Matter’s Hidden Light
The astrophysicist Tracy Slatyer is searching for faint wisps of dark matter annihilating in the early universe — and perhaps in hiding places closer to home.