Liz Greene

That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind. Yes, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of Arpanet, a network that linked four computer nodes in 1969, the prototype of today’s Internet, a giant leap for humankind. (That moon landing was pretty significant, too.)     

Nature loves to play. And play is the thing throughout this issue. Indre Viskontas takes us inside the concert hall to explain how musical ensemble tap into brain wells of creativity and empathy that can’t be reached by going it alone. We also look at a dark side of play. Barclay Bram shares his everyday […]

This month’s theme, “Quandary,” features articles that rebalance the fear that science is out of control, that playing God has set humanity on an inexorable path of destruction. This issue presents new essays, articles, and interviews that crack open quandaries in manifold fields of science.    

What inspired the director of the National Science Foundation to go into science?

Engineers tell us flow describes how fluids or gases behave in relationship to their environment. Flow can be smooth or turbulent. But when it’s turbulent, scientists are baffled about what in the world’s going on. Then again, flow can be a transcendent feeling. It can lift you out of time, make you feel one with […]

Controlling variables in search of a hypothetical result is one of the most important methods in science. But the concept of variables is not limited to methodology. A variable is a reminder that a shift in perception can spring us from cliché and deepen our knowledge and understanding.     

There is something beguiling about the possibility that the letters making up our DNA are also used somewhere far away. On the other hand, the lack of any such message may make the stronger point, telling us that the meaning we’re looking for is scattered across a much broader canvas, and ours to discover.    

Among its many peculiarities, the human brain has a habit of not responding in the same way to identical inputs. This may be due to the fact that our eyes and ears are noisy instruments, or because signals move in a stochastic fashion from neuron to neuron. It may also simply be a matter of […]

Behind the scenes, our world is constantly rebooting. Rebooting is not just frequent, it is structured and varied. We are engineering this kind of granularity not just into computers, but also ourselves.      

The natural world is more relative and fluid than we’d imagined, and our human world is run through with its own mechanisms, many of them our own creation. Physicists talk of many landscapes of physical laws and universes, and our most human characteristics are echoed and copied by both nature and technology.