When children can’t find the words to express themselves, they let their hands do the talking. Novack, who has studied infants as young as 18 months, has seen how the capacity to derive meaning from ...

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 ...

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 ...

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” ...

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?

When we design a skyscraper we expect it will perform to specification: that the tower will support so much weight and be able to withstand an earthquake of a certain strength. But with one of the ...

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 ...

Experienced mathematicians warn up-and-comers to stay away from the Collatz conjecture. It’s a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again. The Collatz ...

We are fond of saying things are symmetric, but what does that really mean? Intuitively we have a sense of symmetry as a kind of mirroring. Suppose we draw a vertical line through the middle of a ...