Grab a mug and slosh the morning coffee around and around and a spinning vortex appears. The swirling rings, with their eddies and choppy waves, obey the laws of classical turbulence, which engineers and applied physicists routinely invoke to study how air flows over an airplane wing or how blood flows through tiny vessels. Shake up a cup of quantum fluid instead and you still get vortices, but nothing like the tornado in your morning brew. Quantum vortices can look like tiny rings that shatter into even more minuscule rings and then shrink away altogether. Connected one moment, in... (p. 20)

"Omg. u no how 2 do the bio hw?"Texting uses a peculiar alphabet. It keeps messages brief but still encodes enough meaning for students to communicate about homework, coffee dates and crushes — all while accommodating the occasional typo. The genetic alphabet, the letters used as the blueprint for all life, balances brevity and clarity in a similar way. Just four letters combine to spell out the more than five dozen three-letter words that encrypt the information needed to make all the cells in the human body, and any other body as well. Figuring out how life's code came to be is nature's ... (p. 18)

As oceans warm, reefs off Japan shift to higher latitudes.

A corkscrew-shaped beam of electrons might someday yield better images of atoms and other tiny things.

Scientists lower the last of more than 5,000 sensors into the Antarctic ice, completing the mile-deep IceCube observatory.