Science

[embedded content] I make it my job to hunt through all the best trailers and find some cool physics thing to explore. In this case, it’s the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story—the Han Solo-led movie, scheduled to come out in May, that takes place some time before Episode ...

“We don’t have much ground truth in biology.” According to Barbara Engelhardt, a computer scientist at Princeton University, that’s just one of the many challenges that researchers face when trying to prime traditional machine-learning methods to analyze genomic data. Techniques in artificial intelligence and machine learning are dramatically altering the ...

While most of biology and medicine focus on the key roles genes and chemicals play in the formation and control of living systems, the spatial arrangement of the components that make up those systems and the physical forces they experience are being increasingly recognized as equally important. Donald Ingber, M.D., ...

A UNLV scientist has discovered the first direct evidence that fluid water pockets may exist as far as 500 miles deep into the Earth’s mantle. Groundbreaking research by UNLV geoscientist Oliver Tschauner and colleagues found diamonds pushed up from the Earth’s interior had traces of unique crystallized water called Ice-VII. ...

The world is full of water, flushing down our toilets and flowing from our taps. And yet where I live, in the American Southwest, and quite possibly where you live, the kind of water people need to survive is getting harder to come by. Across the region, temperatures are rising ...

Data collected by NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter indicate that the atmospheric winds of the gas-giant planet run deep into its atmosphere and last longer than similar atmospheric processes found here on Earth. The findings will improve understanding of Jupiter’s interior structure, core mass and, eventually, its origin. Other Juno ...

The global warming process may be even more intense than originally forecast unless deforestation can be halted, especially in the tropical regions. This warning has been published in Nature Communications by an international group of scientists. “If we go on destroying forests at the current pace — some 7,000 km² ...

You can’t see the bunny, but the picosecond laser certainly can. In a lab at Stanford, engineers have set up a weird contraption, hiding a toy bunny behind a T-shaped wall. And their complex system of computation and rapidly firing lasers can see around that corner. So, too, could the ...

If you want to understand the personality of a material, study its electrons. Table salt forms cubic crystals because its atoms share electrons in that configuration; silver shines because its electrons absorb visible light and reradiate it back. Electron behavior causes nearly all material properties: hardness, conductivity, melting temperature. Quanta ...

A research team of multiple institutes, including the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and University of Tokyo, released an unprecedentedly wide and sharp dark matter map based on the newly obtained imaging data by Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope. The dark matter distribution is estimated by the weak gravitational ...