Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells of living organisms, known as their genomes, and claimed that this genetic database must be some kind of blueprint, code script, or computer. But if DNA really does harbor some greater secret about how…
In 1992, mathematicians famously proved that seven “riffle shuffles” — the kind where a player splits a deck of cards into two piles, then uses their thumbs to interleave them back together in a zipperlike motion — are enough to mix up the deck. When Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis came up with this proof, they also revealed something surprising about what happens along the way: At first…
Every time I write about particle physics, I encounter a moment of uncertainty about a quantity that, at first glance, ought to be clear. How many kinds of elementary particles should I say there are? In experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, physicists smash together beams of protons, breaking them up into all possible elementary bits and pieces. Meanwhile, they have an incredibly accurate…
At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter thought to contain an ocean similar in some ways to one of our own. NASA engraved a metal plate affixed to the spacecraft with a poem, commissioned from Ada Limón during her time as poet laureate of the United States. It reads, in part: And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of…
One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region…
Every second, trillions of watts of solar energy — more than 10,000 times the energy used by modern humans — blast the Earth’s surface. Around 2.4 billion years ago, life took an evolutionary leap when bacteria learned to harness these photons to break apart water molecules and stitch carbon atoms into sugars. Along the way, they flooded Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen and rewrote the rules of life.
The following has been adapted from The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI by Kevin Hartnett. Terry Tao has never been afraid of unconventional ideas. In November 2014, he was on a panel of five distinguished mathematicians, all inaugural recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, which came with a $3 million award. The laureates’ conversation ranged…
I t was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century. To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman, needed some worms. Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms…
What is the future of gene editing with CRISPR? Has AI changed mathematics forever? Will we find other civilizations in the universe? What if we’ve been wrong about dark energy all along? These are just a few of the big, bold questions we’ll be exploring in the new season of The Joy of Why. Mathematician Steven Strogatz and physicist Janna Levin are back as your hosts for these and other…
In 1973, John Archibald Wheeler described the relationship between space and matter in two sentences: “Space acts on matter, telling it how to move. In turn, matter reacts back on space, telling it how to curve.” Wheeler’s words serve as a pithy encapsulation of general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. Wheeler’s sentences also lay out a challenge that theorists face today: When…
For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by…
What Garnet Chan cares most about is basic science. He entered chemistry decades ago to understand some of the most consequential biochemical processes on Earth. But since then, he’s become a central figure in a different arena: the debate over whether quantum computers will have a decisive advantage over ordinary “classical” ones. Over the past decade, many quantum computing researchers have…
The sun is one of the most studied objects in the history of science. The ancient Babylonians and Chinese tracked sunspots and solar eclipses, etching their observations into clay tablets; these records would outlast their civilizations. When the telescope arrived in the early 1600s, astronomers such as Galileo Galilei, Christoph Scheiner, and Johannes Fabricius turned these instruments toward…
Jonas Preine, a recently minted Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg, squinted at a computer screen in the lab of a ship as it bobbed in the North Atlantic near Iceland. The image before him just didn’t make sense. It was June 2024, and Preine was among a crew of scientists who had set off from Reykjavik under slate-colored skies, trading their regular lives — family, friends…
When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly walked the shores of a Swedish archipelago, scanning the ground for pebbles that moved: marine snails. Her adviser, a taxonomist, had tasked her with describing the species present there by documenting their traits. She noticed that snails with thicker shells stayed on the shore…
Let’s start with what’s probably the most tired, overused joke in math: A topologist is someone who can’t tell a coffee cup from a doughnut. Both, you see, have a hole in them. Topology is usually described as a sort of “rubber sheet” geometry in which two shapes are considered the same if one can be stretched or compressed into the other without tearing it. But this summary leaves out something…
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