We typically think of plants strutting their best stuff aboveground: showy flowers, fragrant blossoms, and unique shapes abound. But their development belowground is equally magical.
Ecology
Feb 14, 2022
0
66
The laws of physics underlying everyday life are, at one level of description, completely known, and can be summarized in a single elegant—if quite complex—equation. That's the claim physicist Sean Carroll, an SFI Fractal ...
Quantum Physics
Jan 17, 2022
18
1501
While Rolf Landauer was working at IBM in the early 1960s, he had a startling insight about how heat, entropy, and information were connected. Landauer realized that manipulating information releases heat and increases entropy, ...
General Physics
Nov 5, 2021
1
298
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the total entropy of a closed process can increase or stay the same, but never decrease. The second law guarantees, for example, that an egg can wobble off a table and leave ...
General Physics
Nov 5, 2021
6
2867
Mathematicians who study dynamical systems often focus on the rules of attraction. Namely, how does the choice of the starting point affect where a system ends up? Some systems are easier to describe than others. A swinging ...
Mathematics
Nov 4, 2021
0
58
Higher education in the United States spans five orders of magnitude, from the tiny institutions like the 26-person Deep Springs College in the high desert of eastern California to behemoths, like Arizona State University's ...
Education
Nov 1, 2021
0
161
Consider two stories: the first, about a boy who gets all the attention. He's the cool kid in class who comes from a well-known family. He seems to soar through life. When he errs, few seem to care. The more popular he is, ...
Social Sciences
Oct 27, 2021
0
12
Networks are a powerful model for describing connected systems in biological, physical, social, and other environments. As useful as they are, though, conventional networks are static and are limited to describing links between ...
General Physics
Oct 27, 2021
0
41
In computer science, the graph coloring problem is a classic. Inspired by the map-coloring problem, it asks: Given a network of nodes connected by links, what's the minimum number of colors you need to color each node so ...
Mathematics
Oct 12, 2021
0
30
Archeologists have long had a dating problem. The radiocarbon analysis typically used to reconstruct past human demographic changes relies on a method easily skewed by radiocarbon calibration curves and measurement uncertainty. ...
Archaeology
Sep 15, 2021
1
1168
