One million deaths. That is now roughly the toll of COVID-19 in the United States. And that official milestone is almost certainly an undercount. The World Health Organization’s data suggest that this country hit a million deaths early in the year. Whatever the precise dates and numbers, the crisis is enormous. The disease has taken […]
Two mysterious galaxies, devoid of dark matter, could have a smashing origin story. About 8 billion years ago, researchers propose, two dwarf galaxies slammed into one another. That cosmic crash caused the gas within those two galaxies to split up and form multiple new dwarf galaxies, including the two dark matter–free ones. A newfound row […]
A speck of gold dancing to a pipe organ’s tune has helped solve a long-standing mystery: why certain wind instruments violate a mathematical formula that should describe their sound. In 1860, physicist Hermann von Helmholtz — famous for his law of the conservation of energy — devised an equation relating the wavelength of a pipe’s […]