The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. We all know to be careful about the details we share online, but the information we seek can also be revealing. Search for driving directions, and our location becomes far easier to guess. Check for a password in a trove of compromised data, and we … Read more
“The cell is effectively dressing up as an infectious agent,” Kagan said. “The result is that it convinces itself that it’s infected, and then operates as such.” Simmering Immunity Immune responses can be destructive, and antiviral responses especially so. Because viruses are at their most dangerous when they’re already inside a cell, most immune strategies … Read more
“We know from direct imaging searches of young stars that very few stars have giant planets in [wide] orbits,” Bate said. “It is difficult to accept that there were many large planetary systems in Orion to disrupt.” Rogue Objects Abound At this point, many researchers suspect there’s more than one way to make these strange in-between … Read more
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And yet, defiantly, these alien seas remain liquid. A Mirror-Wrapped Ocean Scientists suspect that a handful of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn—and maybe even some spinning around Uranus and Neptune—harbor oceans. Hefty Ganymede and crater-scarred Callisto produce weak, Europa-like magnetic signals. Saturn’s haze-covered Titan, too, very probably has a liquid-water subsurface ocean. These “are the … Read more
“It was pretty amazing how well the experimental data and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert said. In fact, it matched so closely that Carenza’s first response was that it must be wrong. The team jokingly worried that a peer reviewer might think they’d cheated. “It really was that beautiful,” Carenza said. The observations answer a “long-standing … Read more
Fluids can be roughly divided into two categories: regular ones and weird ones. Regular ones, like water and alcohol, act more or less as expected when pumped through pipes or stirred with a spoon. Lurking among the weird ones—which include substances such as paint, honey, mucus, blood, ketchup, and oobleck—are a vast variety of behavioral … Read more
