Archive: 2016

Eight years ago, a team at the University of Washington developed Foldit, a protein folding game that pits gamers against scientists and computer algorithms. Proteins, which are made up of a string of building blocks, called amino acids, form much of the…

Plants, like animals, require a circulatory system that allows water and nutrients to move throughout them. While animals do this by a pump (the heart), plants do this by a system of tubes, found within the stem. This image is a cross section of a Lily…

Presented by Ashley Villar and Tansu Daylan The detection of gravitational waves has crowned a decades-long experimental endeavor in physics, confirming the major prediction of Einstein’s general theory of gravity. For the first time physicists are able…

President Obama has recently established the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off of the coast of New England. The monument is the first in the Atlantic Ocean and measures in at 4,913 square miles, roughly the size of Connecticut.…

by Rose Filoramo figures by Daniel Utter A Report that Changed History On June 5th, 1981, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a medical report documenting something peculiar: within the span of one year, five previously healthy…

In 1948, Claude Shannon proved that information could be securely encrypted and transmitted given a single-use, randomly generated key. As long as the key – commonly referred to as a ‘one-time pad’ – is used only once, and is equal in length to the…

A new planet with the potential of sustaining life was discovered by astronomers at Queen Mary University Of London orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun – 4.2 light years away. Using small wobbles in the trajectory of Proxima Centauri…

by Benika Pinch figures by Kaitlyn Choi If you watched the Rio Olympics, you probably noticed that several athletes, including swimmer Michael Phelps, were covered in bizarre circular marks. These bruises were caused by cupping, a therapy that uses…

“Shrink to grow” is a two-pronged business strategy where a company gets rid of unprofitable brands (“shrink”) to focus its resources on a few remaining or new brands (“grow”). Companies like P&G and Microsoft have used it, and a similar idea to…

Astronomers used the Gemini Telescope to photograph Dragonfly 44, an ultra diffuse galaxy comprised of almost entirely dark matter. Last week, astronomers announced the discovery of a galaxy that is almost entirely comprised of dark matter. At first…