Jul 18, 2023
Quantum mechanics has always included mind-bending ideas. But the concept of quantum entanglement, famously termed “spooky at a distance” by Albert Einstein in a 1947 letter, seemed to challenge the limits of belief. It remained well on the edges of modern physics until John Stewart Bell’s 1964 paper suggesting a...
Jun 27, 2023
Sloppy by modern standards — and maybe even those back then — a 1955 article on the placebo effect by Harvard anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher was nonetheless remarkable and influential. It paved the way for sounder drug trials and pushed scientists to better understand how we process pain. To explore its...
May 30, 2023
A key report to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 warned that humankind was “unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment” through the burning of fossil fuels and a consequent buildup of “the invisible pollutant” — carbon dioxide — in the atmosphere. Here’s the story of what happened next to that...
Mar 29, 2022
PODCAST: They started out so small, one could fit on the palm of your hand, but to make groundbreaking discoveries, physicists had to think really big — as in, vast machines with the power and capacity to reveal the tiniest building blocks of our universe.
Mar 15, 2022
Digging — quite literally — into our planet’s past to study its paleoclimate has shed light on bygone ice ages and hints at trouble ahead for our now-warming planet.