Science

Ally Peccia, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, studies the origins of volcanic gases and the interactions between volcanoes and the climate. Peccia has also worked to integrate her passions for science and art through unique initiatives, including creating a “Field Guide” with scientists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art focused on volcano-related works and helping to organize the “Research as Art” event at Lamont this past fall. In her own ceramics practice, Peccia often incorporates volcanic themes and materials. In the Q&A below, Peccia reflects on her lifelong love of learning, the mentors who inspired her studies and the importance of fixing the “leaky pipeline” to leadership for women scientists. Courtesy of Ally Peccia How di...

The robotic arm at different stages of activationWei et al An origami-inspired robot arm made with material from cotton plants and pigs biodegrades when no longer needed. Such a soft robot could be further developed to carry out medical procedures inside the body and then pass safely through it. Soft robotics is a growing field because there are a number of applications where a hard, rigid device would be unsafe or unwelcome, such as when working in extremely tight spaces in machinery or in close proximity to – or even inside – people. Most experimental soft robots are made with synthetic materials such as silicon rubber. Now, Hanqing Jiang at Westlake University in Zhejiang, China, and his colleagues have created a simple version from cellulose derived from cotto...

How do you cook your eggs?The Daniel Heighton Food Collection/Alamy Cooking a perfect boiled egg takes at least half an hour, physicists have claimed, as they say the best method for a tasty and nutritious breakfast involves switching repeatedly between pans of different temperatures. As anyone who has ever struggled to get an egg to their liking will know, an even boil is difficult because the yolk and white cook at different temperatures. Cooking at a vigorous boil works for the white, which requires temperatures of 85°C (185°F) for optimum consistency, but can also result in a hard yolk, which only needs 65°C (149°F). Chefs have found immersing the egg in a water bath at a steady temperature of between 60°C and 70°C (140°F and 158°F) can lead to better cooked yolks,...

Simulating turbulent air flow accurately is vital for weather forecastsEUMETSAT/ESA Quantum-inspired algorithms can simulate turbulent fluid flows on a classical computer much faster than existing tools, slashing computation times from several days on a large supercomputer to just hours on a regular laptop. This could improve weather forecasts and increase the efficiency of industrial processes, say researchers. Turbulence in liquid or air involves numerous interacting eddies that quickly become so chaotically complex that precise simulation is impossible for even the most powerful computers. Quantum counterparts promise to improve matters, but currently even the most advanced machines are incapable of anything but rudimentary demonstrations. These turbulence simu...

For as long as we have tried to figure out the nature of reality, we have grappled with the concept of empty space. Around 400 BC, when the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus conceived of small, indivisible bodies called atoms, he supposed there must also exist a void surrounding them: a featureless, unchanging vacuum in which they moved. Today, the void remains a potent idea for understanding the universe, but we have come to realise that it is anything but featureless. More than a century ago, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity revealed that space-time is stretched and warped by the matter it contains. Later, quantum theory introduced the idea of virtual particles, which momentarily appear and disappear in a vacuum, making pure nothingness seem like an intangible...