Rabih Alameddine, who won the National Book Award last month, has described his idiosyncratic approach as “childish ...

Are you convinced that the shuffle mode on your iPod is messing with your mind? Or that certain numbers are bound to come up in the next lottery? If yes, you may be holding on to some serious ...

Randomness would seem to make a mathematical statement harder to prove. In fact, it often does the opposite. Of all the tools available to the mathematician, randomness would seem to offer little ...

These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random ...

Understanding whether nature is deterministically predetermined or there are intrinsically random processes is a fundamental question that has attracted the interest of multiple thinkers, ranging from ...

Electricity, water, gas – these are just some of the public utilities we use every day, whether for cooking food in the morning, heating homes throughout the day, or charging computers at night. But ...

The modern computer age runs on random numbers. Patternless strings of digits are essential for the data encryption that promises privacy and security online. And since computers—fundamentally ...

We all know what “fragile” means. But what is the opposite of fragile? If you are like me, your instinctive response would be “robust” or perhaps “durable.” But you would be wrong. Something that is ...

Chemist Anne Lüscher showed at 39C3 how synthetic DNA can be used for data storage and tamper-proof authentication.