Marissa Cevallos

All Stories by Marissa Cevallos

  1. Quantum Whirls

    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. A […]

  2. Alphabet of Life

    “Omg. u no how 2 do the bio hw?” Janel Kiley RELATED NEIGHBORS | The genetic code used by all life on Earth maps 64 three-letter words to 20 corresponding amino acids and a stop signal, which serves as a punctuation mark. Since similar amino acids are coded by similar three-letter words (degree of shading […]

  3. Tech

    Pint-sized Princess Leia nearer reality

    Faster but fuzzier holographic 3-D teleconferencing debuts.

  4. Earth

    Corals moving north

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

  5. Physics

    A twisted way to take pictures

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

  6. Physics

    Quantum compass for birds

    Robins may use strange physics to migrate.

  7. Space

    South Pole neutrino detector complete

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

  8. Chemistry

    Twisted rules of chemistry explained

    A theorist uses quantum mechanics to explain why Möbius molecules have different numbers of electrons than standard rings.

  9. Physics

    Size of a proton? Really small

    But physicists can't agree on one number.

  10. Space

    Planet in the sky with diamonds

    Scientists have discovered a Jupiter-sized orb with a mostly carbon atmosphere 1,200 light-years distant, the first time astronomers have detected such a world.

  11. Earth

    Icequake swarms portend some avalanches

    By keeping an ear to the ice, scientists can predict impending glacial crack-ups two weeks in advance.

  12. Black Holes in the Bathtub

    If you stuck your hand inside a black hole recently created in a Canadian laboratory, you wouldn’t get sucked in like a string of spaghetti. You’d just get wet. By creating event horizons in labs here on Earth, researchers are demonstrating an astrophysical phenomenon called Hawking radiation. Nicolle Rager Fuller A BLACK HOLE ESCAPEE Particle-antiparticle […]