Facts So Romantic

Recently I was in San Francisco, a city known for its tech companies, steep hills, and fierce winds. Each day I’d run around the neighborhood and up through the park, ending with a spectacular…

Larry Mayer, a marine geophysicist, gets shivers when he looks at a night sky of stars. He understands why we explore outer space and NASA has spent billions mapping our extraterrestrial…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Of all the known particles in the universe, only photons outnumber neutrinos. Despite their abundance, however, neutrinos…

From the newswire:Award-winning magazine and fast-growing science brand poised for growthAn investor group of super-fans has banded together as a single ownership group to acquire Nautilus,…

SCIENCE MATTERSMore than ever. Science gave us the light bulb.Science gave us the tractor.Science gave us the vaccine.Science showed us the atom.Science showed us the gene.Science showed…

Last month, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist, excoriated world leaders for their ongoing failure to address the climate crisis. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood…

In The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum discuss a disturbing hypothetical scenario. A lone actor in Nigeria, “home to a great deal of spamming and online fraud activity,”…

News on the quantum physics grapevine, Frankfurt Institute theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder tells me, is that Google will announce something special next week: Their paper on achieving…

When, some weeks ago, I was first contacted by an online scientific publication asking me to review a submission on the subject of “shit knives”, I initially thought it was a hoax or…

Like all new parents, I must sound like a kook when I babble along with my 9-month-old daughter. That’s okay: It delights her. I sometimes ask her what she might mean as she offers some…