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01/01/05

Fine-tune this

Quick, what's 987654321 divided by 123456789? The answer is close to 8, but not exactly 8. Why does the result differ by about a tenth of a million, yielding 8.0000000729...?

01/01/05

Dawn Meson: Orders of magnitude

From cave paintings of bison to Monet landscapes, artists have studied and interpreted the natural world. Dawn Neal Meson, a San Francisco artist, has taken this theme one level further, or, rather, many orders of magnitude smaller.

11/01/04

Tau lepton

The discovery of an elementary particle that looked a lot like the electron, but had 3500 times its mass stunned most particle physicists three decades ago.

11/01/04

Secret city

Snezhinsk, Russia, kept a secret for 35 years—its own existence.

11/01/04

Anyes Taffard: Fisikari. Physicienne. Physicist.

When her Basque grandmother—Amatxi—taught five-year-old Anyes Taffard the language of her ancestors, she overlooked the Basque term for physicist: fisikari. But by the time she was 12, Taffard was already drawn to mathematics and science.