This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: On the origin of carrots — Do you know where your carrot, if you have a carrot, comes from? A new study from the University of L’Aquila in Italy outlines one approach to finding out. “It […]
Was something wrong with Beethoven’s metronome? Well, was something wrong? Well? A fair number of people have tried hard to find out. Four of them produced this mathematics-based analysis: “Was Something Wrong with Beethoven’s Metronome?” Sture Forsén, Harry B. Gray, L.K. Olof Lindgren, and Shirley B. Gray, Notices of the AMS, vol. 60, no. 9, […]
Questions along the lines of “When does the future start?” have perplexed scholars for . . . some time. For example, do people tend to think that The Future begins immediately* after The Present, or is its arrival more ‘smeared out’? [see illustrations] Steps towards answering this puzzle have recently been taken by Professor Hal […]
Here’s Diego Golombek talking about reading and wondering about time travel—an experience that, when he was a child, excited Diego in a way that led to his eventual unusual career. Diego now studies—and experiments with—biology to try to understand some of the seemingly simply, scientifically mystifying things that happen in nature every day. This is […]