On the morning of April 4, physicists filed into a third-floor meeting room at Harvard University’s Jefferson Laboratory. Word had gotten out that there would be a big announcement from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, a group of physicists who are investigating dark energy — a mysterious, repulsive form of energy that permeates the universe. The meeting room at...
Like many children of his generation, raised on a steady diet of Jurassic Park and its sequels, Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer wanted to be a paleontologist when he grew up. Unlike most, he came close. Rather than digging for fossilized bones in the dirt, however, he paws through objects in natural history museums and medical collections for old biological specimens from which he can extract the...
Within just a few years, artificial intelligence systems that sometimes seem to display almost human characteristics have gone from science fiction to apps on your phone. But there’s another AI-influenced frontier that is developing rapidly and remains untamed: robotics. Can the technologies that have helped computers get smarter now bring similar improvements to the robots that will work...
Nearly a century ago, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is getting larger. Modern measurements of how fast it is expanding disagree, however, suggesting that our understanding of the laws of physics might be off. Everyone expected the sharp vision of the James Webb Space Telescope to bring the answer into focus. But a long-awaited analysis of the telescope’s observations released late...
After Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, he spent the next decade trying to come up with a theory of gravity. But for years, he kept running up against a problem. He wanted to show that gravity is really a warping of the geometry of space-time caused by the presence of matter. But he also knew that time and distance are counterintuitively relative: They change...
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