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The human gut microbiome plays a critical role in the body, communicating with the brain and maintaining the immune system through the gut-brain axis. So it isn’t totally far-fetched to suggest that microbes could play an even larger role in our neurobiology. Fishing for Microbes For years, Irene Salinas has been fascinated by a simple […]
It gets better. What if B is also anchored to a quantum object that’s in a superposition of two locations? Then A’s quantum state is now smeared out in two different ways, depending on the possible locations of B. Because determining B’s quantum state determines A’s state, A and B are now entangled. Renato Renner, […]
Asteroids are less pristine than comets, having often endured heating and the effects of liquid water. But these effects can produce dramatic new organic complexity. For decades, scientists have known that meteorites called chondrites, which originate from asteroids, contain a staggering diversity of organic molecules. The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969, contains […]
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience. This rule acted like the key to a lock. […]
However, modeling has shown that it is difficult to scatter enough stars toward the black holes to solve the final-parsec problem. Alternatively, each black hole might have a small disk of gas around it, and these disks might draw in material from a wider disk that surrounds the empty region carved out by the holes. […]
Their result shows the importance of not taking anything for granted, said Noga Alon, a mathematician at Princeton. “We have to be suspicious, even about things that intuitively look very likely to be true.” Gladkov, Pak, and Zimin found many small-graph examples that satisfied the conjecture, but in the end, those did not reflect the […]
“It’s a great algorithm,” said Erik Demaine, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s very fast, simple, and easy to implement.” To put this procedure into practice, you’d need to decide on a system for organizing your notes—a data structure, in the lingo of computer science. That may sound like a minor […]
When England’s team exposed caterpillars to electric fields similar to those generated by a flying wasp, caterpillars displayed defensive behaviors such as coiling, flailing, or biting. “This basically insinuates,” England said, that “prey and predator can detect each other just using static electricity.” Dornhaus, the behavioral ecologist, questioned whether electroreception buys the caterpillar much time. […]