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Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences

from Quanta Magazine [alt+shift+b] in science

The physicist Sidney Nagel delights in solving mysteries of the universe that are hiding in plain sight. The post Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences first appeared on Quanta Magazine
9th May 2025

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What Is a Manifold?

In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics. The post What Is a Manifold? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

3rd Nov 2025 • 12 votes
A Thermometer for Measuring Quantumness

“Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it. The post A Thermometer for Measuring Quantumness first appeared on Quanta Magazine

1st Oct 2025 • 25 votes
‘World Models,’ an Old Idea in AI, Mount a Comeback

You’re carrying around in your head a model of how the world works. Will AI systems need to do the same? The post ‘World Models,’ an Old Idea in AI, Mount a Comeback first appeared on Quanta Magazine

2nd Sep 2025 • 53 votes
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery

After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture. The post At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery first appeared on Quanta Magazine

1st Aug 2025 • 52 votes
Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan. The post Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms first appeared on Quanta Magazine

2nd Jul 2025 • 42 votes

More in science

It took me seven months to get my baby an Australian passport

I’m an Australian father of four, living in the US. Something of a corner case. Nevertheless, getting my kids Australian citizenship by descent, and then Australian passports so we can fly home legally, has kicked off a carnival of errors with a very dark side. Australia is generally thought of as a developed western liberal country with relatively high state capacity. And I have generally found that at least state government services, now administered through centralized offices, have become more efficient over time. Passport applications for children living overseas, however, remain a time machine with a difficult security overhang. Australian …

4 hours ago • 1 votes
The Visible Human Project

Researchers created a dataset of photos of thousands of paper-thin slices of a male and female cadaver to create one of the most detailed datasets about the human body.

a week ago • 1 votes
Anne Heggli, Jonathon Keats, & Adam Csank: Art & Science at the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve

In a remote corner of the driest state in the country, Anne Heggli's team has been keeping watch over some of Earth’s oldest beings. Since 02012, Heggli’s NevCAN network has recorded conditions at the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve every eight minutes. The result is more than 120 million data points and a high-resolution portrait of how a bristlecone pine thrives. Paleoclimatologist Adam Csank showed how bristlecone microcores reveal the droughts and floods these trees survived long before us, a history that fine-tunes models of what's ahead. Artist and philosopher Jonathon Keats went further. “The most accurate clock,” he said, “is a tree.” His monumental artwork Centuries of the Bristlecone keeps bristlecone time, a clock calibrated to the trees' own growth over millennia. Together, Heggli, Keats and Csank made the case for long science: patient, continuous observation that will help us answer future urgent questions. “Data at this resolution,” Csank said, “is like a Rosetta Stone” for understanding nature’s resilience. At fourteen years young, the bristlecone record is just beginning, Heggli said, but it already holds the key to questions like these: How will bristlecones adapt? What happens when the droughts and floods they've weathered for millennia arrive faster and more frequently? “We can't answer the questions if we're not watching,” said Csank. “We are the stewards of this data,” Heggli concluded. “This is why we need long science.”

2 weeks ago • 1 votes
In praise of questions

Prende y se apaga sola, sale después de hora. CHARLY GARCÍA La máquina de ser feliz I’ve learned to tolerate them, and sometimes even like them, but Zoom meetings are weird. Even in familiar contexts: I have weekly check-ins with … Continue reading →

2 weeks ago • 1 votes
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