It was the first day after the San Francisco Bay Area declared that residents shelter in place, and I was getting ready to see patients. I generally dress in a dry-cleaned shirt, slacks,…

During the Spanish flu of 1918, it was Vick’s VapoRub. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, it was canned food. Now, as the number of cases of COVID-19 grows worldwide, it’s,…

Colonel John Boyd was a legendary fighter pilot with the United States Air Force. As an instructor at the prestigious Fighter Weapons School, he became known as “40-second Boyd”…

In 2007, when touchscreens first started coming on the scene, I was excited, like everyone. As a lifelong science-fiction fan, they always seemed to me to be the obvious choice for…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Mathematicians have studied knots for centuries, but a new material is showing why some knots are better than others.Image…

Claudius Ptolemy’s monumental astronomy book, the Almagest, established a unified mathematical framework for computing the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets at any time…

If you ask Siri to show you the weirdest people in the world, what images might you see? In fact, none. Siri showed me different links to the same scientific paper, published a decade…

The only intelligent life forms we know of reside here on Earth. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying to answer the question: “Are we alone?” The search for extraterrestrial…

Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech writer for President Obama, writing presidential…

On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my computer to write music on its own. I wanted to…