英語で読む日経サイエンス

As you read these words, the air’s molecules are zipping around you at 2,000 miles per hour, faster than a speeding bullet, and bombarding you from all sides. Meanwhile the atoms and molecules … 続きを読む →

I have always been startled and fascinated by the sandlike abundance of galaxies sprinkled across the night sky. The most sensitive optical image ever made by human beings, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field … 続きを読む →

Proteins are the stuff of life. They are the eyes, arms and legs of living cells. Even DNA, the most iconic of all molecules in biology, is important first and foremost because it contains the genes t … 続きを読む →

Thirty years ago Alan H. Guth, then a struggling physics postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, gave a series of seminars in which he introduced “inflation” into the lexicon of cosmolo … 続きを読む →

With the click of a mouse, archaeologist Vince Gaffney proudly summons up a vision of an ancient landscape. Amid the clutter of his office at the University of Birmingham in England, the 52-year-old p … 続きを読む →

The first indication that our expedition was not going as planned was the abrupt sputter and stop of the boat’s inboard engine at 2 a.m. The sound of silence had never been less peaceful. Sudden … 続きを読む →

Ten years ago publication of the human genome sequence gave the world a blueprint for a human being. But just as a list of automobile parts does not tell us how a car engine works, the complete genome … 続きを読む →

I am standing next to a five-year old girl in Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York in northern Australia. When I ask her to point north, she points precisely and … 続きを読む →

Is it possible to automate scientific discovery? I don’t mean automating experiments. I mean: Is it possible to build a machine—a robot scientist—that can discover new scientific k … 続きを読む →

Peering through the microscope at the thin slice of  fossilized bone, I stared in disbelief at the small red spheres a colleague had just pointed out to me. The tiny structures lay in a blood … 続きを読む →

On September 23, 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle, director of the Berlin Observatory, received a letter that would change the course of astronomical history. It came from a Frenchman, Urbain Le Verrier … 続きを読む →

The mirror, a perfect hexagon of gunmetal gray, stands vertically on a low platform. It is about two inches thick and more than four feet wide, a precisely carved slab of beryllium that gleams in the … 続きを読む →

Once again, the world is about to end. The latest source of doomsday dread comes courtesy of the ancient Mayans, whose calendar runs out in 2012, as interpreted by a cadre of opportunistic authors and … 続きを読む →

The movie Fantastic Voyage, the story of a miniaturized team of doctors traveling through blood vessels to make lifesaving repairs in a patient’s brain, was pure science fiction when it came out i … 続きを読む →

Back in the early 1970s, a handful of scientists, engineers, defense contractors and U.S. Air Force officers got together to form a professional group. They were essentially trying to solve the same p … 続きを読む →