Forty years after a 75-cent accounting error sent him chasing a hacker across the early Internet, Cliff Stoll returned to the story at DEF CON—with an overhead projector, his original transparencies from a 1987 NSA presentation, and a thermos of minestrone soup.
AI can now help design whole viral genomes. That creates a security problem computer defenders know well: how do defenders recognize a threat when it no longer resembles the threats they know? DNA synthesis gives biosecurity a rare chokepoint—for now.
Science communicators love to compare complex systems to 'the number of atoms in the universe.' It's a terrible analogy. Here is a proper tour of scale, mapping the journey from the quantized foam of the Planck length all the way to the formal axioms of set theory.
Theory without observation is just beautiful math; observation without theory is just raw data. Here’s how an extreme, X-ray-spewing microquasar in our own galaxy provided the exact physical data needed to prove the universe behaves like a hologram.
To bridge the gap between Einstein's curved spacetime and the discrete jumps of quantum spin, you have to look under the hood of how continuous symmetry works. The secret to quantum gravity lies in a 19th-century algebraic code: Lie Theory.