Do you know what information is? No worries if you don’t. Clarity on the concept is apparently hard to come by. In a May cover story, New Scientist wondered, “What is information?” The answer: “a mystery bound up with thermodynamics” that “seems to play a part in everything from how machines work to how living […]

Urban din is forcing animal mating calls to be either unsexy or unheard.

A relatively unknown experiment is already drawing conclusions from the sound of silence.

The director of the National Science Foundation on what brought her back to science.

Human noise is a rising global pollutant. Urbanization, road networks, and energy extraction infrastructure are all widespread and expanding sources of acoustic waste. In the contiguous 48 states today, to take just one illustration, nearly 4 million miles of road cover the country; as a result, no area is more than 21 miles from a […]

The origin of quantum noise is the modern incarnation of a millennia-old debate.