From a bee’s hexagonal honeycomb to the elliptical paths of planets, symmetry has long been recognized as a vital quality of nature. Today’s theorists are pursuing an even more exotic symmetry that, mathematically speaking, could be nature’s final fundamental symmetry: supersymmetry.
World Science Festival co-founder Brian Greene and seven-time Emmy Award–winner Alan Alda muse on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in a post-performance discussion after a reading of Alda’s play “Dear Albert.”
Nowadays, the tools for tracing your family tree have advanced far beyond looking back at names in the family Bible or compiling a scrapbook of paper records. Using your genetic information to find long-lost relatives is easier and cheaper than ever before—and scientists are looking to push the technology even further by analyzing our skin and facial features.
Fred Kavli, a Norwegian-born U.S. citizen, was a physicist, entrepreneur, business leader, innovator and philanthropist dedicated to supporting research and education that has a positive, long-term impact on the human …
Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality.
Just a handful of technologies deserve to be called “game changers”—and CRISPR-Cas9, the new gene-editing tool, is one of them. Discovered just three years ago, CRISPR is sweeping through labs around the world and researchers are already using it to experiment on diseases.