What We're Reading

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.

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

The potentially habitable world, called Ross 128b, circles a stable red dwarf that is not blasting out sterilizing radiation, as some other stars with Earth-like planets do.

Researchers say they can train computers to identify sexual orientation and criminality by scanning a person’s face. But critics say it’s bad science.

Ultrasonic energy can be harnessed to alter brain activity and treat disease — but first, scientists need to learn how it works.

Scientists from the Cracking the Glass collaboration have found a way to see molecular re-arrangements in deeply supercooled liquids, which ordinarily can take centuries or even millennia. Along the way, they have also found new physical properties of “aged” supercooled liquids and glasses.

With willpower and suitable financial means, you can start a science career at any age. Most doctoral students are in their 20s and 30s, but 8 percent are older than 45.

Candès, who holds the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University, was named a 2017 MacArthur Fellow for "exploring the limits of signal recovery and matrix completion from incomplete data sets with implications for high-impact applications in multiple fields."