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Hints of Life’s Start Found in a Giant Virus
Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie were used to finding strange viruses. The married virologists at Aix-Marseille University had made a career of it. But pithovirus, which they discovered in 2013...
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The New Science of Evolutionary Forecasting
Michael Lässig can be certain that if he steps out of his home in Cologne, Germany, on the night of Jan. 19, 2030 — assuming he’s still alive and the sky is clear — he will see a full moon. Lässig’s...
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In Search of Dark Stars
In September, Katherine Freese will take the helm of one of the most prestigious theoretical institutes in the world, Nordita, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Stockholm, Sweden. For...
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Where Animals Come From
For billions of years, single-celled creatures had the planet to themselves, floating through the oceans in solitary bliss. Some microorganisms attempted multicellular arrangements, forming small...
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As Animals Mingle, a Baffling Genetic Barrier
Most people don’t get to use the tree-climbing skills they perfected as children once they’re adults. But for Jochen Wolf, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, climbing trees is...
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The Musical, Magical Number Theorist
For Manjul Bhargava, the counting numbers don’t simply line themselves up in a demure row. Instead, they take up positions in space — on the corners of a Rubik’s Cube, or the two-dimensional layout of...
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A Brazilian Wunderkind Who Calms Chaos
It was pouring rain on a chilly spring day, and Artur Avila was marooned at the University of Paris Jussieu campus, minus the jacket he had misplaced before boarding a red-eye from Chicago. “Let’s...
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A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces
As an 8-year-old, Maryam Mirzakhani used to tell herself stories about the exploits of a remarkable girl. Every night at bedtime, her heroine would become mayor, travel the world or fulfill some other...
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In Noisy Equations, One Who Heard Music
Martin Hairer’s masterwork is so fantastic, so fully baked and so far out of left field, one fellow mathematician declared, that the manuscript must have been downloaded into his brain by a more...
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A Grand Vision for the Impossible
One summer afternoon in 2001, while visiting relatives in India, Subhash Khot drifted into his default mode — quietly contemplating the limits of computation. For hours, no one could tell whether the...
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At Multiverse Impasse, a New Theory of Scale
Though galaxies look larger than atoms and elephants appear to outweigh ants, some physicists have begun to suspect that size differences are illusory. Perhaps the fundamental description of the...
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I Contain Multitudes
Your DNA is supposed to be your blueprint, your unique master code, identical in every one of your tens of trillions of cells. It is why you are you, indivisible and whole, consistent from tip to toe....
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Quark Quartet Fuels Quantum Feud
In August 2003, an experiment at the KEKB particle accelerator in Japan found hints of an unexpected particle: A composite of elementary building blocks called quarks, it contained not two quarks like...
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The Thermodynamic Theory of Ecology
The Western Ghats in India rise like a wall between the Arabian Sea and the heart of the subcontinent to the east. The 1,000-mile-long chain of coastal mountains is dense with lush rainforest and...
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Evolution’s Random Paths Lead to One Place
In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a...
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Finding Dark Energy in the Details
Like most theoretical cosmologists, Joshua Frieman was thrilled when astronomers announced in 1998 that the expansion of the universe appeared to be speeding up, driven by an invisible agent that they...
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‘Big Bang Signal’ Could All Be Dust
There was little need, before, to know exactly how much dust peppers outer space, far from the plane of the Milky Way. Scientists understood that the dimly radiating grains aligned with our galaxy’s...
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Lizard Stowaways Revise Principle of Ecology
When Matthew Helmus was about eight years old and desperate for a pet, he saved up enough money to order a lizard through an ad in the back pages of Mad magazine. The creature arrived in his mailbox a...
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Elusive Form of Evolution Seen in Spiders
As a rule, spiders are antisocial. They hunt alone, zealously defend their webs from other spiders, and sometimes even eat their mates. “Cannibalism and territoriality comes naturally to Arachnida,...
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Brain’s Positioning System Linked to Memory
Google Maps, the powerful online mapping tool, owes its success to two key elements: GPS, which calculates a position on the Earth’s surface, and an exhaustive map that contains information such as...
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