EveAim

Deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is sleeping. But it won’t be quiet for long. Over the coming years, the world’s largest particle accelerator will be supercharged, increasing the number of proton collisions per second by a factor of two and a half. Once the work is complete in 2026, researchers hope…

I don't normally watch many NASCAR races, but I do come across some NASCAR videos online. Sometimes these clips become the basis of a great physics problem. In this case, it's a 21-car crash at the Daytona 500 earlier this week. There are two things I find amazing about it: First, that a tiny collision…

The bees, as you've probably heard, are dying, in massive numbers. Termed colony collapse disorder, the die-off counts among its causes a parasite aptly named Varroa destructor. A flat, button-shaped, eight-legged critter no more than 2 millimeters long, varroa mites invade honeybee hives around the world in droves, latch onto their inhabitants, and feed on…

Boston Dynamics’ videos aren’t just famous, at this point they are almost a staple of the internet—typical stuff like robots doing backflips and opening doors for their friends. But the machines only became a YouTube phenomenon because someone grabbed the first video from Boston Dynamics’ website and uploaded it themselves. “We just had it on…

I'm not sure what it is, but something keeps drawing me into physical competition shows. It used to be Ninja Warrior, but now there is a new one—Titan Games. It's essentially a competition with different crazy events. It's not the competition that I like, it's those weird situations that they put these people in. I…

The fabric of space and time is widely believed by physicists to be emergent, stitched out of quantum threads according to an unknown pattern. And for 22 years, they’ve had a toy model of how emergent space-time can work: a theoretical “universe in a bottle,” as its discoverer, Juan Maldacena, has described it. Quanta Magazine…

This story originally appeared on Reveal and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent nonprofit news organization. While soybean farmers watched the drift-prone weed killer dicamba ravage millions of acres of crops over the last two years, Arkansas beekeeper Richard Coy…

Suppose you traveled back in time—say 40,000 years into the past—and then you got stuck. What would you do? How would you rebuild all the stuff that you like? That's the premise of the book How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, by Ryan North. Without getting into the nitty-gritty…

Today’s artificial intelligence systems, including the artificial neural networks broadly inspired by the neurons and connections of the nervous system, perform wonderfully at tasks with known constraints. They also tend to require a lot of computational power and vast quantities of training data. That all serves to make them great at playing chess or Go,…

To figure out how and when ancient fish first crawled from the ocean onto land, Neil Shubin is about to head to the mountains of Antarctica. Leaving behind family and friends for the upcoming holidays, he and a team of five other scientists and a mountain guide will be camping at the base of a…