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1 month ago | 
quantamagazine.org | Charlie Wood |Elise Cutts |Lyndie Chiou
Introduction Last spring, a team of nearly 1,000 cosmologists announced that dark energy — the enigmatic agent propelling the universe to swell in size at an ever-increasing rate — might be slackening. The bombshell result, based on the team’s observations of the motions of millions of galaxies combined with other data, was tentative and preliminary.
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1 month ago | 
quantamagazine.org | Elise Cutts |Charlie Wood |Lyndie Chiou |Matt von Hippel
Introduction In the late 1970s, Saturn’s odd moon Titan, a hazy orange world, was expecting visitors — first, NASA’s Pioneer 11 probe, then the twin Voyager spacecraft. Most moons are airless or boast little more than gauzy, gaseous veils. But Titan is cloaked in a blanket of nitrogen and methane so thick that, with a pair of wings and a running start, astronauts on the frosty satellite could fly just by flapping their arms.
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Dec 22, 2024 | 
wired.com | Elise Cutts
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty, icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for two years as onboard instruments caught and analyzed the dust and gas streaming away from the comet. Scientists sought hints about how our solar system came to be—and about the origin of one class of molecules in particular.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
eos.org | Elise Cutts
Before it flies from a pitcher’s fingers, every ball thrown in Major League Baseball (MLB) games is massaged with a finger-sized dollop of mud to improve its grip and remove its glossy sheen. And it’s always the same mud—Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, which is scooped up in buckets from the same secret location in New Jersey. The MLB has tried and failed to find synthetic replacements for rubbing mud multiple times. But something about the natural stuff just seems to be magic.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
newscientist.com | Elise Cutts
There is something strange about Earth. A few billion years ago, a process started here that we have never seen anywhere else. It completely reshaped the planet’s surface and its carbon cycle, sculpted new landscapes and has kept our home temperate and habitable for billions of years. That process is plate tectonics, in which Earth continuously subsumes and reforms the slabs of its rocky outer shell.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Anil Ananthaswamy |Elise Cutts |Zack Savitsky |Charlie Wood
Introduction Imagine standing on a railway platform watching a trolley go past. A girl on the trolley drops a bright red ball. To her, the ball falls straight down. But from the platform, you see the ball traverse an arc before hitting the trolley floor. The two of you observe the same event, but from different reference frames: one anchored to the trolley and the other to the platform.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
scientificamerican.com | Elise Cutts
How few corners can a shape have and still tile the plane?” mathematician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple question was about the geometry of tilings, also called tessellations—arrangements of shapes, called tiles or cells, that fill a surface with no gaps or overlaps. Humans have a preoccupation with tessellation that dates back at least to ancient Sumer, where tilings featured prominently in architecture and art.
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
bigthink.com | Elise Cutts
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people In 2020, scientists detected a gas called phosphine in the atmosphere of an Earth-size rocky planet. Knowing of no way that phosphine could be produced except through biological processes, “the scientists assert that something now alive is the only explanation for the chemical’s source,” The New York Times reported. As “biosignature gases” go, the phosphine seemed like a home run. Until it wasn’t.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Elise Cutts |Zack Savitsky |Charlie Wood |Jonathan O'Callaghan
Introduction Ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty, icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for two years as onboard instruments caught and analyzed the dust and gas streaming away from the comet. Scientists sought hints about how our solar system came to be — and about the origin of one class of molecules in particular.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Zack Savitsky |Elise Cutts |Charlie Wood |Jonathan O'Callaghan
Introduction In a lab nestled between the jagged peaks of the Austrian Alps, rare earth metals vaporize and spew out of an oven at the speed of a fighter jet. Then a medley of lasers and magnetic pulses slow the gas nearly to a halt, making it colder than the depths of space. The roughly 50,000 atoms in the gas lose any sense of identity, merging into a single state. Finally, with a twist of the ambient magnetic field, tiny tornadoes swirl into existence, pirouetting in the darkness.
