Facts So Romantic

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.In August 2016, a research team claimed to have unearthed evidence of life in a remote outcrop of 3.7-billion-year-old…

Everyone loves a good optical illusion. Most people first come across them as kids, and are instantly transfixed. And most of us never quite outgrow them. Even cats seem to enjoy the occasional…

Can you remember the time when you first felt awe, that feeling of being in the presence of something immense and mind-blowing? The natural world—with its domineering mountains, colossal…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Hoping to gain insight into domains of nature that lie beyond experimental reach—the interiors of black holes, the…

What does the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way look like? Early next year, we might find out. The Event Horizon Telescope—really a virtual telescope with an effective…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The first time I heard a mathematician use the phrase, I was sure he’d misspoken. We were on the phone, talking…

Earlier this year, Dan Doctoroff, the C.E.O. of Sidewalk Labs, Google’s sibling company under Alphabet, answered a question about what his company “actually does” during a Reddit…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The cosmos plays hide-and-seek. Sometimes, though, even when astronomers have a hunch for where their prey might…

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.If you watch an exhausted baby carefully, you may be able to see gravity tug heavy eyelids down. Likewise, a sleeping honeybee’s…

As a kid, when my pet turtle died we had a funeral—of course—and buried him in the backyard. When the family dog passed, his remains were cremated and placed in an urn on the mantle.…