Max G. Levy

Los Angeles

Freelance Science Journalist at Freelance

freelance science journalist. cofounder @Sequencermag words in @WIRED, @Quantamagazine, @TED_ED, etc. phd @CUBoulder. he/him

Articles

The ‘Elegant’ Math Model That Could Help Rescue Coral Reefs

1 month ago | quantamagazine.org | Max G. Levy

Since before she could remember, Eva Llabrés was a snorkeler. Her grandfather, a fishmonger from the Spanish island of Menorca, bought Llabrés her first mask and fins; throughout childhood, she was in the Mediterranean, spotting octopuses, eels, seagrasses and bright starfish. The ocean was a home, but in school, Llabrés preferred physics and math. In Barcelona for college, she dove into the theoretical mysteries of black holes and quantum gravity.
The history of the world according to rats

Jan 19, 2025 | ted.com | Max G. Levy

By Max G. Levy Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content. By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy
These Newly Identified Cells Could Change the Face of Plastic Surgery

Jan 9, 2025 | businessandamerica.com | Max G. Levy
Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold

Dec 9, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Ben Brubaker |Susan D'Agostino |Max G. Levy |John Pavlus

Introduction How do you construct a perfect machine out of imperfect parts? That’s the central challenge for researchers building quantum computers. The trouble is that their elementary building blocks, called qubits, are exceedingly sensitive to disturbance from the outside world. Today’s prototype quantum computers are too error-prone to do anything useful. In the 1990s, researchers worked out the theoretical foundations for a way to overcome these errors, called quantum error correction.
What Is Distributed Computing?

Nov 25, 2024 | flipboard.com | Max G. Levy

5 hours agoIndia: Flying Man Astonishes Global Audience with Jet-Powered Flight at Bengaluru Tech SummitBengaluru, India - November 20, 2024 A "Flying Man" dazzled the audience at a Tech Summit in Bangalore with a remarkable jet suit powered by seven mini jet engines on November 20. The aerial performer Issa Kalfon, 23, became the focal point of excitement and awe at the historic Bangalore Palace.
What Is Distributed Computing?

Nov 25, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Max G. Levy |John Pavlus |Stephen Ornes |Ben Brubaker

Introduction No device is an island: Your daily computational needs depend on more than just the microprocessors inside your computer or phone. Our modern world relies on “distributed computing,” which shares the computational load among multiple different machines. The technique passes data back and forth in an elaborate choreography of digital bits — a dance that has shaped the internet’s past, present and likely future.
I tried to train my color vision. Here’s what happened.

Nov 1, 2024 | sequencermag.com | Max G. Levy

One afternoon during my PhD, I took a break from lab work to snack on a banana. I grabbed a seat in the office, slid off my headphones, and peeled open my treat. Just as I bit in, I noticed a labmate staring at me. "Max," she told me, holding back some laughter. "That banana is a 4."I instantly knew what she meant because I'd made this mistake before. The banana was days from being ripe, and I had misjudged the color. A laughably green banana.
The Secret Electrostatic World of Insects

Oct 27, 2024 | wired.com | Max G. Levy

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect odors from distant flowers. For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand sense that we lack.
How Can Math Help Beat Cancer?

Oct 10, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Steven Strogatz |Max G. Levy |Janna Levin |Annie Melchor

When we think about medicine’s war on cancer, treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy spring to mind first. Now there is another potential weapon for defeating tumors: statistics and mathematical models that can optimize the selection, combination or timing of treatment. Building and feeding these models requires accounting for the complexity of the body, and recognizing that cancer cells are constantly evolving.
More Than Meets The Eye: The Enigma of Being ‘Good With Faces’

Oct 7, 2024 | sequencermag.com | Max G. Levy

About five months ago, I set out on a humble mission in my neighborhood. Though I have a good number of friends sprinkled across the sprawl of Los Angeles, I’d been wanting to extend more hyper-local roots. Community is notoriously hard to come by here, so one morning, I hatched a plan — frankly the first plan that came to mind — to become A RegularTM somewhere around the block. I wanted a sense of home; I wanted to exchange faces and names. More than that, I wanted to be a face and a name.