Forerunners

In a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode from 2007, Larry David and his wife Cheryl and their friends attend a ceremony to celebrate his public donation to the National Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group. Little does he know that the actor Ted Danson, his arch-frenemy, also donated money, but anonymously. “Now it looks […]

Get a whiff of a new sensory experience in history.

Playthings shouldn’t confine kids but allow them to ask, What if?

Why people distrust vaccines and how they can be convinced otherwise.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. As fundamental constants go, the speed of light, c, enjoys all the fame, yet c’s numerical value says nothing about nature; it differs depending on whether it’s measured in meters per second or miles per hour. The fine-structure constant, by contrast, has no dimensions or units. It’s a pure […]

Arguably the best prescription to improve the situation facing women in science is for there to be more women in science.Oleg Golovnev / Shutterstock The increasing visibility of women in leadership roles is one of the few success stories in the struggle for equality in science. But a new study, which connects how often scientists’ […]

Is memorizing a string of words a key to what makes the human brain unique?

Revisiting the gospel of the second law of thermodynamics.

What this year’s Nobel-winning discovery of the black hole at our galaxy’s center reveals.

Not long ago, I heard an echo of Albert Einstein’s religious views in the words of Elon Musk. Asked, at the close of a conversation with Axios, whether he believed in God, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla paused, looked away from his interlocutors for a brief second, and then said, in that mild […]