Nova next
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Sex, Drugs, and Women’s Desire
There may be other ways to boost sexual desire than the new pill, Addyi.
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Graphene, Meet Mainstream
Two recent discoveries could finally make fast, efficient electronics based on wonder material graphene possible.
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Friction Fighters
Vuletic and his lab group spent years setting up this maze of a room in order to study technology so new we’re not quite sure if it really exists yet: quantum computing. But when he realized that their experiment could do much more, his curiosity sent him on an unexpected detour. “We could study friction…
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Recovering from Hate
Science is revealing the neurological and sociological stimuli behind extremism—and how people can escape its grasp.
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The Codes of Modern Life
In 1960, Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon published a paper in the Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, entitled, “Polynomial Codes Over Certain Finite Fields,” a string of words that neatly convey the arcane nature of their work. Within those five pages was the basic recipe for the most efficacious error-correction codes…
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How Physics Will Change—and Change the World—in 100 Years
Frank Wilczek thinks that a physicist transported from 50 years ago to today would not be nearly so clueless, and one transported from 25 years ago could get up to speed in short order. So today, thinking 100 years ahead may not be entirely silly.
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Putting a Price on Nature
I’ve done the math, and for $1.20, you can preserve a 19-inch by 19-inch square of rainforest habitat—home, on average, to 0.000006 long-tailed macaques and 0.0000001 pangolins. All you have to do is pay a bit more for palm oil, found in roughly half of all grocery store items: chocolate bars, cereal, and lipstick, to…
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The Coal That’s Good for the Climate
Biochar is a type of charcoal made from plant and animal waste that has been heated intensely in an environment with little or no air, a process known as pyrolysis. Unlike combustion, which releases carbon dioxide, the process allows the organic matter to retain its carbon as it’s transformed into charcoal, preventing the gas from…
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Dealing with the Health Data Deluge
There’s a revolution afoot in medicine. It has been simmering below the surface for the last decade or so, but like many revolutions, you won’t really take notice until it’s all but over. And it’s all thanks to your phone.
