Number of words: 291 Superhard materials are of the incredible interest in different handy applications, and an increasing number of research efforts are centered around their turn development. A superhard material has two crucial features, hardness, and fracture toughness, representing its resistance to deformation and cracks propagation, respectively. Materials with such properties that would suit … Read more

Number of words: 1,496 Here is a false concept often heard from the lips of the newly graduated: “Everything of major importance in the various areas of science has already been clarified. What difference does it make if I add some minor detail or gather up what is left in some field where more diligent … Read more

Number of words: 1,286 Laura Molles is so attuned to birds that she can tell where birds of some species are from just by listening to their song. She’s not a real-world Dr Doolittle. She’s an ecologist in Christchurch, New Zealand, who specializes in a little-known area of science: bird dialects. While some birds are … Read more

Number of words: 317 One last problem remains. If 300 small comets do hit the moon everyday, where some people wanted to know, was all the water on the moon? One of the strongest conclusions from the study of the lunar rocks brought back by the astronauts is that the moon is remarkably dry. But … Read more

Number of words: 3,065 Seven bikes lean against the wall of Jim Papadopoulos’s basement in Boston, Massachusetts. Their paint is scratched, their tyres flat. The handmade frame that he got as a wedding present is coated in fine dust. “I got rid of most of my research bikes when I moved,” he says. The bicycles … Read more

Number of words: 2,322 It all began back in 1981. On the third day of August a Delta rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base carrying a pair of NASA satellites, both known as Dynamics Explorer, into elliptical orbits. One of these satellites circles the poles of Earth at an altitude ranging from 350 … Read more

Number of words: 793 As the end of the second world war neared, mass production of the newly developed antibiotic penicillin enabled life-saving treatment of bacterial infections in wounded soldiers. Since then, penicillin and many other antibiotics have successfully treated a wide variety of bacterial infections. But antibiotics don’t work against viruses; antivirals do. Since … Read more

Number of words: 1,375 Even as data science becomes ubiquitous, we still have a shortage of people who truly understand data. Yaneer Bar-Yam is a Professor and President of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He graduated from MIT and is an expert in complex systems. Throughout this pandemic, he has been meticulously analyzing COVID-19 … Read more

Number of words: 605 Until the late fifties, Rous sarcoma virus had been shown to cause tumors only in live chickens. Temin, working closely with Harry Rubin, wanted to study how the virus converted normal cells into cancer cells. To do this, they needed a vastly simplified system—a system free of chickens and tumors, and … Read more

Number of words: 164 In 1828, a Berlin scientist named Friedrich Wöhler had sparked a metaphysical storm in science by boiling ammonium cyanate, a plain, inorganic salt, and creating urea, a chemical typically produced by the kidneys. The Wöhler experiment—seemingly trivial—had enormous implications. Urea was a “natural” chemical, while its precursor was an inorganic salt. … Read more