What We're Reading

Topological effects might be hiding inside perfectly ordinary materials, waiting to reveal bizarre new particles or bolster quantum computing.

Africa and Asia are absorbing more refugees than the European Union. Misleading reports about the magnitude of flows into Europe and the U.S. are creating unjustified fears about refugees, thereby undermining efforts to manage the massive humanitarian problems.

A survey of Mensa members finds that high I.Q. is associated with mental and physical issues, especially mood and anxiety disorders.

The National Institutes of Health has lifted its funding ban on research that manipulates pathogens to make them more deadly. But grant applications will undergo greater scrutiny than in the past.

Researchers have now determined that the regulation mechanisms used by bacteria to adapt to different environments are based on a global control process that can be described in a single differential equation.

He won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on beating the limitations of light microscopy. Now he's moved to academia and pondering new areas to study, including space propulsion.

A jumble of thousands of cubic dice, agitated by an oscillating rotation, can rapidly become completely ordered, a result that is hard to produce with more conventional shaking (includes video that demonstrates the packing process).

In the biography "The Last Man Who Knew Everything," Catherine Westfall lauds a candid life of a Manhattan Project scientist at home in theory and experimentation.

How do our brains decide what we should have for dessert or what car to buy? Anne Churchland, a member of the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain, describes the efforts of the BRAIN Initiative to create a virtual "mega laboratory" to understand decision making.

Using correlated nuclei, researchers managed to get heat to flow from a cold nuclei to a hotter one, contrary to expectations of everyday experience.