Computer scientists are a demanding bunch. For them, it’s not enough to get the right answer to a problem — the goal, almost always, is to get the answer as efficiently as possible. Take the act of multiplying matrices, or arrays of numbers. In 1812, the French mathematician Jacques Philippe Marie Binet came up with the basic set of rules we still teach students. It works perfectly well...
It can be hard to tell, at first, when a cell is on the verge of self-destruction. It appears to be going about its usual business, transcribing genes and making proteins. The powerhouse organelles called mitochondria are dutifully churning out energy. But then a mitochondrion receives a signal, and its typically placid proteins join forces to form a death machine. They slice through the cell with...
Elliptic curves are among the more beguiling objects in modern mathematics. They don’t seem complicated, but they form an expressway between the math that many people learn in high school and research mathematics at its most abstruse. They were central to Andrew Wiles’ celebrated proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the 1990s. They are key tools in modern cryptography. And in 2000...
Clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies sit at the intersections of giant, crisscrossing filaments of matter that form the tapestry of the cosmos. As gravity pulls everything in each galaxy cluster toward its center, the gas that fills the space between the galaxies gets compressed, causing it to heat up and glow in X-rays. The eRosita X-ray telescope, lofted into space in 2019...
Biologists have often wondered what would happen if they could rewind the tape of life’s history and let evolution play out all over again. Would lineages of organisms evolve in radically different ways if given that opportunity? Or would they tend to evolve the same kinds of eyes, wings and other adaptive traits because their previous evolutionary histories had already sent them down certain...
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