The Tufts Daily

The word “physics” alone is enough to make many students flinch. But quantum physics…  “It’s a crazy difficult thing to explain if you want to hang on to this idea of reality,” Peter Love, a Tufts professor of physics and computer science, said.  And most people do indeed like to stick to reality as we […]

Trigger warning for all vampires — look away and avoid the urge to count. Continue reading and be stuck with numbers for a while! Did you encounter a vampire this Halloween? If you missed your chance, you can still learn about vampire numbers in math. A vampire number is a number that can be written […]

What do encrypted messages, recognizing speech commands and running simulations to predict the weather have in common? They all rely on matrix multiplication for accurate calculations. DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company, recently developed a faster algorithm to conduct matrix multiplications based on deep reinforcement learning. This recent auto-discovery of an efficient algorithm in mathematics by […]

The issue of the workplace’s impact on workers’ physical and emotional health has been a topic of discussion largely not part of the portfolio of the Office of the Surgeon General. That was the standard until a recent report was released on Oct. 20, 2022, by Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy.  The “Surgeon General’s Framework […]

The fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears teaches young kids about the sweet spots of life. From that favorite chair to the perfect temperature of food, sweet spots can be found everywhere. Did you know there’s a sweet spot of “just right” in our emotions as well? As Halloween rolls around, people are […]

Maybe you’ve heard about the lack of female representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines or the gender pay gap that still lingers in many STEM fields today. However, a gender equity issue in STEM that gets talked about a lot less frequently is a phenomenon known as the citation gap.  This refers to […]

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three pioneering scientists for their work in a remarkable new area of research. The award was given to Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless. Bertozzi is the first openly gay woman to win a Nobel prize, and this is Sharpless’ second Nobel prize, […]

If you’re passionate about baseball and are familiar with the history of the sport, you may be familiar with the player Babe Ruth and his record of 714 home runs set in 1934. This record stood strong until Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run in 1974 — a historic day for baseball and an […]

I stared blankly at my phone as I read an incoming message, “Sorry, I forgot the dirt.” I was devastated. I really needed that bag of dirt. I had asked my friend to pack me a bag of soil when he was away in New Jersey for the weekend. Inside that bag would have been […]

What do a non-stick pan, a raincoat and a medical stent have in common? They all have water-repelling properties that resist water uptake or degradation by hydrolysis. Hydrophobicity, the capacity to not interact with water, is important as we are consistently in contact with water in the external environment and inside our cells. A recent […]