The tendency to supplement communication with motion is universal, though the nuances of delivery vary slightly. In Papua New Guinea, for instance, people point with their noses and heads, while in ...

Scientists want to figure out what made that possible. In its current form, the machinery that converts light energy to chemical energy in photosynthesis—a protein complex called a reaction center—is ...

In a bid to make sense of the impending data deluge, some at CERN are turning to the emerging field of quantum computing. Powered by the very laws of nature the LHC is probing, such a machine could ...

Netflix has plenty of movies to watch. Maybe too many. Sometimes finding the right film at the right time can seem like an impossible task. Let us help you. Below is a list of some of our favorites ...

When Chris Golas called the cops to report that he had been the victim of crypto crime, he was met with total incomprehension. “People didn’t even know what I was talking about,” he recalls. Golas, a ...

The universe has cooked up all sorts of bizarre and beautiful forms of matter, from blazing stars to purring cats, out of just three basic ingredients. Electrons and two types of quarks, dubbed “up” ...

Turbulence, the splintering of smooth streams of fluid into chaotic vortices, doesn’t just make for bumpy plane rides. It also throws a wrench into the very mathematics used to describe atmospheres, ...

If you have a few chess sets at home, try the following exercise: Arrange eight queens on a board so that none of them are attacking each other. If you succeed once, can you find a second arrangement?

Selection isn’t in doubt, but many scientists have argued that most evolutionary changes appear at the level of the genome and are essentially random and neutral. Adaptive changes groomed by natural ...

It would be tempting to conclude from all this that the basic problems are solved in principle and the path to a future of ubiquitous quantum computing is now just a matter of engineering. But that ...

In 1950 Edward Nelson, then a student at the University of Chicago, asked the kind of deceptively simple question that can give mathematicians fits for decades. Imagine, he said, a graph—a collection ...

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Researchers at Microsoft have announced the creation of the first “topological qubits” in a device that stores ...