mathematics

Even before Stephen Wolfram took the stage, he evoked the largest applause of the conference so far. As the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and author of A New Kind of Science, Wolfram stands almost as tall as Kurzweil himself in the eyes of the audience. His pronouncements carry more weight than most of the conference's other speakers, which is why I felt relieved when Wolfram disregarded worry about our extinction at the hands of sentient robots, and instead focused on a very different concept of what role AI will play in our future.

In theory, designing a robot that continuously juggles a single ball should not be difficult. Calibrating the machine would be a pain but once you got the thing running, it should continue to juggle the ball until some variable intervenes. In a perfect world, this would occur elegantly, but here on Earth things just don't come off so beautifully. However, through some smart design and precise math, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have created the Blind Juggler, so named because it juggles a ball continuously, even when variables are introduced, without the use of sensors.

For all the visualizations, artist's renderings and animations of the birth of our universe, it is still exceedingly hard to imagine the Big Bang: from nothing emerges everything.

But what if you could create a big bang on a lab bench -- make a model of the universe's emergence. University of Maryland engineering professor Igor Smolyaninov has proposed just that, describing the opportunity to create a "toy big bang" using precisely designed metamaterials that are mathematically analogous to certain conditions of the real-world big bang.

E. coli can do a lot more than wreak havoc within your digestive system. Scientists have made strides over the years turning the little microbe species into computational workhorses. Now a team of scientists at Missouri State Western University and Davidson University has devised a bacterial computer that can solve complex equations, using the bacteria as the brains.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have come up with a model for overtaking the majority leadership in any competitive field. But instead of studying psychology or sociology to derive his conclusion, Hai-Tao Zhang has used a model based entirely from physics.

PopSci's Grouse recently reviewed Wolfram|Alpha. I guess that's what happens when you ignore your editors for a week: They let someone else write about your project!

Racial profiling is a moral minefield, pitting safety against equity—one human right against another. But forgotten in the furor is a more important moral (and scientific question) about profiling: Does it actually work?

We take about six months to create our annual list of the most impressive young scientists in the U.S., six months of quizzing academic department heads, professional organizations and journal editors about the most creative and important research in the country and the individuals making it happen. And every year, those leaders-a serious and measured group-nominate hundreds of candidates with barely contained excitement. "There is no doubt in my mind that his work will revolutionize the field," says one. "He has done something that, frankly, I thought was impossible," says another.