Category: 9. Sci/Tech

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick…

The liquid state of matter requires a relatively narrow range of temperature and pressure to exist. Put simply, as pressure is lowered, the boiling and freezing (or melting) points of matter begin to converge.

In space, where the pressure is…

A total lunar eclipse “blood moon” should be visible for much of England and Wales on…

Wayne Gramlich was there at the very beginning of the Internet. While still in high school in…

Human life is facing one of the biggest challenges in its history. Rampant climate change, driven by industrial activity, threatens our entire civilisation. The destabilised currents, intensifying heat waves and increasingly frequent storms are a…

Humans and many rodents share one feature in common that may come as a shock: thumbnails. Most people would think that rodents only have sharp claws, but the majority of these mammals actually have nails on their thumbs that look human in an…

Life memories for most of us are like grains of sand, slipping through our fingers as we try to hold on to as many as we can. But for a rare few, emotional events stick like cobwebs and are much harder to shake off.

A new case study describes…