Pencils Down: Experiments in Education
Latest Articles
The Organisms That Make Earth’s Harshest Places Home
Extremophiles that thrive in the most unforgiving environments aren’t just biological curiosities. Understanding their resilience has many implications for us.
Martin Picard’s Mitochondrial Theory of Mind
The biologist’s bold “energetic view of life” looks to the body’s strangest organelles as the link between cells, health, and mind and the foundation of our experience of being alive.
Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow
Today’s computers need safeguards against random energy fluctuations. Thermodynamic computers would put those fluctuations to use.
Why Am I Left-Handed?
An invisible difference in 10% of humans poses deep mysteries in several fields at once.
We Know Simple Fluids Can Flow. Turns Out, Some Can Fracture.
Researchers thought that what enabled complex fluids to break apart was their elasticity. But a crack in a nonelastic simple fluid has them questioning that idea.
Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations?
Astronomer David Kipping discusses why claims of extraterrestrial life keep dissolving under scrutiny, why we need a more statistically grounded approach to searching for life beyond Earth, and why it’s rational to believe that we may be alone.
Is Life Just Different?
The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?
Researchers Reveal the Power of ‘Quantum Proofs’
When checking that solutions to certain problems are correct, it turns out, you can’t get around the inherent complexity of the quantum world.
Astrophysicists Puzzle Over Webb’s New Universe
Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a wealth of new theories to explain them. Now they just need to figure out which ones are true.