They are the biggest black holes in the known Universe, billions of times more massive than our Sun, but little is known about how these monsters form and grow so big. New telescopes and techniques are giving us a new way of looking at these giants. Halfway between the belly of Delphinus the Dolphin and […]
Featured Journalism
A moment of silence, a glimpse inside a black hole, and the Nobel Prize
On a crisp September day in 1964, Roger Penrose had a visit from an old friend. The British cosmologist Ivor Robinson was back in England from Dallas, Texas, where he lived and worked. Whenever the two met up, they never lacked for conversation, and their talk on this occasion was non-stop and wide ranging. As […]
The weird space that lies outside our Solar System
Far from the protective embrace of the Sun, the edge of our Solar System would seem to be a cold, empty, and dark place. The yawning space between us and the nearest stars was for a long time thought to be a frighteningly vast expanse of nothingness. Until recently, it was somewhere that humankind could […]
What if the Universe has no end?
The usual story of the Universe has a beginning, middle, and an end. It began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe was tiny, hot, and dense. In less than a billionth of a billionth of a second, that pinpoint of a universe expanded to more than a billion, billion times […]
Quantum computing moves from theory to market, race for supremacy heats up
For decades, quantum computing research largely happened in university laboratories, where the field’s tremendous theoretical potential contrasted with the reality of slow, incremental progress. Today, though, startups and established tech companies are helping to drive advances in the field, bringing quantum computing into the mainstream. One Toronto-based startup, Xanadu, is betting on a branch of […]
We can be heroes, just for one hour
A serial killer runs amok, taunting the police with cryptic puzzles and clues. A quantum physicist enters an ultra-secure laboratory and disappears into the ether. An ancient monarch hides her most prized treasure in the heart of a booby-trapped dungeon. These and hundreds of other scenarios — often lifted from sci-fi, fantasy, horror, espionage, heist, […]
Why is an icicle shaped like an icicle?
In his cluttered lab at the University of Toronto, Stephen Morris peers through the viewfinder of a camera pointed into a slot in an insulated plywood box the size of a beer fridge. Jutting wires and hoses connect the box to water tanks, drains, and power sources. Inside, a mixture of water and fluorescent dye […]
Primal Urge
Two to the power of Seventy-Four Million Two Hundred and Seven Thousand Two Hundred Eighty-One minus One, a Castor Design book series comprised of three volumes, transforms the largest prime number known into a physical object. Did human beings discover mathematics, or did we invent it? Are concepts like perfect squares, parabolas and prime numbers […]
The Dark Corners of Our DNA Hold Clues about Disease
The so-called “streetlight effect” has often fettered scientists who study complex hereditary diseases. The term refers to an old joke about a drunk searching for his lost keys under a streetlight. A cop asks, “Are you sure this is where you lost them?” The drunk says, “No, I lost them in the park, but the […]
Seven Molecules’ Claim to Fame
From drinking water to DNA, from caffeine to carbon dioxide, and from Lipitor to Viagra—that is from atorvastatin to sildenafil citrate—molecules define our personalities, regulate our abilities, and dictate our feelings. Invisible to the human eye, many of them are biological celebrities: They famously smell or stink, make us feel depressed or elated, pollute our […]
Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile
In 1974, Roger Penrose, a British mathematician, created a revolutionary set of tiles that could be used to cover an infinite plane in a pattern that never repeats. In 1982, Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli crystallographer, discovered a metallic alloy whose atoms were organized unlike anything ever observed in materials science. Penrose garnered public renown on […]