Browsing: Digital_post

Is turbulence simply the breakdown of order? Or is it, in fact, order by another name? Cosmic winds, the human heartbeat, and financial markets all have it. What commonalities persist among all these examples? Can turbulence be controlled, and should we try?

Mutations make us what we are, linking and blurring the harmful and the helpful. Even the most intricate biological mechanisms, with the most important functions, are already slipping into the future to do something else. In this issue, we trace the outlines of a world that is continually abandoning and inventing itself, often with our […]

Symmetry, on first glance a mere detail of arrangement, has unexpected powers, aesthetic, practical—even moral. We find it in physics, families, and the brain. As shorthand, it heightens our powers of observation, helping us recognize faces and calculate particle interactions. As organizing principle, it steers genes and galaxies. Scientists, long ago convinced that it is […]

This issue, we cast our gaze onto the feedback loops that regulate, control, and sometimes destabilize the world around us. We unearth them at every scale of space and time, from ants to continents, seconds to millions of years, human myths to the origins of life. Most surprising of all, we find a world carefully […]

Where does the story of life and light begin? Maybe with the fact that most life on Earth runs on sunlight, or that starlight may have set the direction in which all of Earth’s biomolecules spiral. But, when most of us cannot see the Milky Way, and glowing screens have shifted our circadian rhythms, have […]

Since the beginning, scientists have been dividing reality into increasingly smaller bits: atoms, quarks, proteins, genes. As the list of parts has multiplied, so have their possible interactions, making the boundaries around scientific disciplines increasingly porous. From polymers to parasites, and genes to galaxies, our world is replete with wheelers and dealers, and hosts more shotgun […]

Remember Ben Franklin’s words: “you may delay, but time will not.” On the other hand, some physicists are telling us that time may not exist to begin with. And anyway, since quantum mechanics is challenging causality itself, what impact could your actions possibly have? As we look deeper, time looks more elastic and less defined.

They say that home is the place where they have to take you in. Is it? From stellar birth clusters and allergic adaption, to symbiotic evolution and our personal microbiome, Nature has its own definitions of home. And our own ideas are shifting: Our physical homes are under renovation, and what we do at home […]

This issue tackles something we don’t like to think about. But not only is waste everywhere on our land, in our oceans, and even in space—it is also useful. It drives innovation, creates wealth, teaches us about the past, and is a kind of currency in systems from biology to physics.

There were hackers long before the denial-of-service attack. Life is a script written in carbon and transmitted faithfully between generations—sometimes. Other times, it is hacked by viruses, stolen by bacteria, or mutated by cosmic rays. Join us as we pull back the curtain on nature’s information wars.