IN THE ARID, sun-soaked northwest corner of Australia, along the Tropic of Capricorn, the oldest face of Earth is exposed to the sky. Drive through the northern outback for a while, south of Port Hedlund on the coast, and you will come upon hills softened by time. They are part of a region called the Pilbara Craton, which formed about 3.5 billion years ago, when Earth was in its youth.
Continue reading 3.5 BILLION-YEAR-OLD FOSSILS CHALLENGE IDEAS ABOUT EARTH’S START
IN 1995, WHILE he was a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, the biomedical scientist Peter Friedlsaw something so startling it kept him awake for several nights. Coordinated groups of cancer cells he was growing in his adviser’s lab started moving through a network of fibers meant to mimic the spaces between cells in the human body.
Continue reading The Mystery of How Cancer Cells Barrel Through Your Body
WITH A SURPRISING new proof, two young mathematicians have found a bridge across the finite-infinite divide, helping at the same time to map this strange boundary.
Continue reading Mathematicians Bridge the Divide Between Infinity and the Physical World
THE ASTROPHYSICIST AND author Janna Levin has two main offices: One at Barnard College of Columbia University, where she is a professor, and a studio space at Pioneer Works, a “center for art and innovation” in Brooklyn where Levin works alongside artists and musicians in an ever-expanding role as director of sciences. Beneath the rafters on the third floor of the former ironworks factory that now houses Pioneer Works, her studio is decorated (with props from a film set) like a speakeasy. There’s a bar lined with stools, a piano, a trumpet and, on the wall that serves as Levin’s blackboard, a drink rail underlining a mathematical description of a black hole spinning in a magnetic field. Whether Levin is writing words or equations, she finds inspiration just outside her gallery window, where a giant cloth-and-paper tree trunk hangs from the ceiling almost to the factory floor three stories below.
Continue reading Meet Janna Levin, the Chillest Astrophysicist Alive
OUR BRAINS HAVE an extraordinary ability to monitor time. A driver can judge just how much time is left to run a yellow light; a dancer can keep a beat down to the millisecond. But exactly how the brain tracks time is still a mystery. Researchers have defined the brain areas involved in movement, memory, color vision and other functions, but not the ones that monitor time. Indeed, our neural timekeeper has proved so elusive that most scientists assume this mechanism is distributed throughout the brain, with different regions using different monitors to keep track of time according to their needs.
Continue reading New Clues to the Mystery of How Our Brains Keep Time
The Fat Cat Collective 