Issue_63

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically from nature’s most innocuous-seeming feature: empty space. Specifically, the seed of the multiverse hypothesis is the inexplicably tiny amount of energy infused in empty space—energy known as the vacuum energy, dark energy, […]

If you can’t find dark matter, look first for a dark force. While cosmologists may be fascinated by what dark matter does, particle physicists are fascinated by what dark matter is. For us, dark matter should be—naturally—a particle, albeit one that is still lurking hidden in our data. For the last few decades, we’ve had […]

The other day I stepped into my apartment elevator and saw a neighbor of mine joking around with a construction worker. “You know what you do with these guys?” my neighbor said to me. He grabbed the construction worker by his bright-colored vest and pretended to shove him out the door. For the past few […]

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Despite its ability to bend both minds and space, an Einsteinian black hole looks so simple a child could draw it. There’s a point in the center, a perfectly spherical boundary a bit farther out, and that’s it Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . […]

What it was like being among the first women in the US missile program.

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.You don’t often see the word beautiful in scientific articles. Yet it’s easy to see why cell biologists Niccolò Banterle and Pierre Gönczy used the word when describing a crucial cell structure called the centriole in a recent review. The scientists, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, are helping to provide […]

Even if you make it past the interplanetary radiation, you’re still confronted with any number of hazards, and they don’t stop once you land.Image by SyFy / YouTube In the why-aren’t-you-watching-this television show The Expanse, humanity has spread out into the solar system. Mars and Earth stand as bitter rivals, with Ceres settlers somewhere in between. […]

A software engineer tackles the distractions of online reading.

A scientific field founded by men is now mostly female.

The geneticist Siddhartha Mukherjee discusses the influence of modern genetics on our ideas of chance and fate.