Gayoung Lee

1 day ago | scientificamerican.com | Gayoung Lee

Roman gladiators’ fights to the death have inspired morbid fascination for millennia. But for something seemingly so well-documented, it’s rare for archaeologists find physical evidence of such combat in the form of Roman gladiators’ remains. Most of what we know about the fights comes from indirect records, such as texts or illustrations that described the bloody, raucous events.

3 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Gayoung Lee |Lee Billings

The allure of quantum computers is, at its heart, quite simple: by leveraging counterintuitive quantum effects, they could perform computational feats utterly impossible for any classical computer. But reality is more complex: to date, most claims of quantum “advantage”—an achievement by a quantum computer that a regular machine can’t match—have struggled to show they truly exceed classical capabilities.

3 days ago | flipboard.com | Gayoung Lee

NowMusk caught in ‘code red’ moment at TeslaCNN — Like many American manufacturers, Tesla is caught in a bind thanks to President Donald Trump’s trade war. Unlike most of those other companies, though, Tesla has an added wrinkle – its CEO, Elon Musk, sometimes called the First Buddy for the close relationship he’s cultivated with the president.

1 week ago | scientificamerican.com | Gayoung Lee

Humans walking in crowds tend to form orderly lanes. It’s something we do “without even knowing [why],” says Iker Zuriguel, a physicist at the University of Navarra in Spain. But sometimes, such as in crosswalks during peak commuting times, that order turns to utter chaos. Mathematicians used physics models and gymnasium experiments to understand why and pinpointed a specific “critical angle” of the crowd’s movement—13 degrees—to explain why crowded pathways snarl to a standstill.

1 week ago | scientificamerican.com | Gayoung Lee

The neutrino is a notorious troublemaker in the world of particle physics. This tiny, elusive particle with no electric charge likely permeates every corner of the universe, but you’d be hard-pressed to know that without extremely specialized instruments. Trillions pass through you every second, in fact, all without interacting with a single atom of your body.