"An hour before the lecture, the overflow room in the basement of Waterloo Collegiate Institute was already filling up. I double-checked with the volunteer at the door, to make sure I understood what I was seeing. Every month during the school year, eager science fans snap up free tickets to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics’ public lecture as soon as they appear online, she told me. The fifty or so people in the cafeteria had missed out in the virtual stampede, but they were here anyway, hoping some o..."

"Using a few ultracold ions, intense lasers and some electrodes, researchers have built the first programmable quantum computer. The new system, described in a paper to be published in Nature Physics, flexed its versatility by performing 160 randomly chosen processing routines. Earlier versions of quantum computers have been largely restricted to a narrow window of specific tasks. To be more generally useful, a quantum computer should be programmable, in the same way that a classical computer must be able to ru..."

"In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air. The cemetery lies in what is now China's northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world's largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring ..."

"The year I was born, in 1981, the US Government decided magick was real. Well, the “US Government” is of course an abstraction—specifically, Congressional Research Service was commissioned to do a report on psychic phenomena and offered the following conclusion: “Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there exists an ‘interconnectiveness’ of the human mind with other minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and amplifi..."

"The word after "infinity" in my dictionary is "infirm," a definition of which is "weak of mind." This is how many of us who are not mathematically inclined feel upon contemplating infinity. (To see how mathematicians and similar thinkers regard infinity, see Working With Infinity: A Mathematical Perspective.) We feel weak because our finite minds can only go so far with the concept, and because every time we think we're on the verge of securing even a shadowy understanding, we're tripped up by something. A frien..."

"For generations, farmers and explorers have been finding what they assumed were random incisions on stones throughout the Northeast United States. Very little was thought of the odd rocks until archeologist and language specialist Barry Fell, the man singularly responsible for bringing the importance of these scratches to national attention in his monumental work America, B.C., recognized they were ancient writings and actually deciphered one of these inscriptions in 1967. This stone, found at what has come to b..."

"Was George Lucas on to something when he wrote, "May the force be with you?" Did he know something about the universe's mysterious machinations that physicists today don't understand? Sci-fi worlds are often a blend of mythology, fantasy and science, and a good writer can blur the lines between them to momentarily suspend disbelief. While it's true that a good deal of what comprises the universe is unknown to science - dark energy and dark matter, for example - these unknowns do not suspend the absolute truth of un..."