calculus

In 1954, the Cold War was not even a decade old, and its imprint on pop culture in the form of the spy thriller was still in its infancy. Ian Fleming had published the first James Bond novel a year prior, but in postwar film and TV, producers were mostly looking for escapist entertainments and historical epics that got as far from the political zeitgeist as possible. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when Bond broke into cinemas and The Man from UNCLE hit TV screens, that spies became cool, and the nuclear-powered…

This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the massive Willow oil project earlier this week infuriated climate advocates and environmentalists while drawing praise from Alaska politicians and oil industry figures. As the Biden administration weighed the benefits and drawbacks of the project over the past year, the latter camp argued that the project would help replace Russian oil supplies as well as deliver an economic boon for…

Credit: Marina Sun / Shutterstock With inflation in the UK and around the world threatening to spiral out of control, prices of everything from milk to oil, energy and Christmas presents are a concern for most of us. Most people understand prices as simply the result of supply and demand—an agreement between sellers and buyers about how much something should cost. …

A mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive pattern of lights ahead. Through training, the mouse has learned that if it stops at the lights and holds that position for 1.5 seconds, it will receive a reward—a small drink of water. Then it can rush to another set of lights to receive another reward.This setup is the basis for research published in July in Cell Reports by the neuroscientists Elie Adam, Taylor Johns and…

For decades, theoretical particle physicists have struggled with vexing calculus problems called Feynman integrals. They are central to every calculation they make—from predicting how magnetic a particle called the muon should be, to estimating the rate at which Higgs bosons should emerge at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Now, theorists have found a way to solve the integrals numerically by reducing them to linear algebra. The method promises faster and more…