Explained: Margin of error
When you hear poll results reported with a certain margin of error, that’s only part of the story.
Explained: Femtoseconds and attoseconds
As electronic and optical devices get ever faster, terms for ever-smaller increments of time are coming into wider use.
Explained: Near-miss asteroids
What to do in the event of an asteroid streaking toward Earth? Activate the asteroid ‘fire drill.’
Explained: Sigma
How do you know when a new finding is significant? The sigma value can tell you — but watch out for dead fish.
Explained: Measuring earthquakes
How do scientists measure jolts such as the recent disaster in Japan? Hint: They don’t use the Richter scale.
Explained: Ad hoc networks
Decentralized wireless networks could have applications in distributed sensing and robotics and maybe even personal communications.
Explained: Transiting exoplanets
How astronomers learn whether a planet is habitable by observing slight changes in light emanating from its parent star.
Explained: Defining recessions
It’s not what conventional wisdom holds, as an MIT economist — who heads the bureau charged with identifying U.S. downturns — makes clear.
3 questions: P vs. NP
After glancing over a 100-page proof that claimed to solve the biggest problem in computer science, Scott Aaronson bet his house that it was wrong. Why?
Explained: the Doppler effect
The same phenomenon behind changes in the pitch of a moving ambulance’s siren is helping astronomers locate and study distant planets.
Explained: Bandgap
Understanding how electrons get excited is crucial to creating solar cells and light-emitting diodes
Explained: Phonons
When trying to control the way heat moves through solids, it is often useful to think of it as a flow of particles.
Explained: Quark-gluon plasma
By colliding particles, physicists hope to recreate the earliest moments of our universe, on a much smaller scale.
Explained: Knightian uncertainty
The economic crisis has revived an old philosophical idea about risk and uncertainty. But what is it, exactly?