Category Archives: Mathematics

Orbital ATK Joins Heavy Rocket Race

An artist’s rendition of Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Rocket in flight. Image courtesy Orbital ATK.

Last month, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket made headlines as the first privately built heavy lift rocket to enter space.

Now, Orbital ATK’s Chandler-based Launch Vehicle Division plans to join them.

Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
Chandler-Based Orbital ATK Division To Build New Heavy Rocket

Mesa Verde Builders Possibly Used Geometry in Sun Temple

A plan view of Mesa Verde national Park's Sun Temple with geometric figures overlaid.
Photo courtesy of Sherry Towers.

A sacred site built in southwest Colorado around 800 years ago hints that the ancestral Pueblo people might have used geometry.

The analysis of the Sun Temple at Mesa Verde National Park offers the first hard evidence that a prehistoric North American society possibly employed such figures in construction.

Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
Geometry Possibly Used In Mesa Verde Sun Temple Construction

Jeopardy-Winning Computer Crunches Numbers to Fight ALS

Watson on Jeopardy stage set at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Photo by Atomic Taco.

Barrow Neurological Institute is working with IBM’s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, Watson, to identify treatment targets for Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

ALS is a poorly understood neuromuscular disease with only limited treatment options. Its capacity to strike anyone, at any time, seemingly without pattern, has puzzled researchers.

Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
BM’s Watson Computer Helps Barrow Identify New ALS Genes

Eureka! I Have Lost It!

The original keyboard cats.

Left to our own devices and allowed to live without constant fear of death by hunger or violence, we devise some pretty startling stuff.

Sure, some of our better efforts don’t outlast our calamities, or go obsolete before their time or simply never get their chance to shine because no one yet recognizes the need for them. But you can’t keep a good idea down forever, as I explore in this list of …

10 Times Humanity Found the Answer (and Then Forgot)

After 85 Years, Physicists Confirm Weyl Particle

Photo portrait of Hermann Weyl.
Hermann Weyl. Photo courtesy ETH-Bibliothek Zurich.

In 1928, the equations of British physicist Paul Dirac helped to describe the workings of the subatomic particles known as fermions. Within a year, other theorists – including a contemporary and schoolmate of Einstein’s named Hermann Weyl – had come up with solutions to Dirac’s equations that meant two other, quite odd types of fermions might also exist.

Proving them right would take some time, and Weyl’s quasiparticle assumed a kind of legendary status until 2015, when three separate teams confirmed its existence (my article says two, but a third popped up after I wrote it). Read on to find out more about this “ghost particle” and how it could transform electronics.

Meet Weyl, the Massless Particle That Could Upend Electronics