What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Restless Cell’

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Updated 07 August 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Restless Cell’

Authors: Christina Hueschen and Rob Phillips 

In recent decades, the theory of active matter has emerged as a powerful tool for exploring the differences between living and nonliving states of matter. “The Restless Cell” provides a self-contained, quantitative description of how the continuum theory of matter has been generalized to account for the complex and sometimes counterintuitive behaviors of living materials. Christina Hueschen and Rob Phillips begin by illustrating how classical field theory has been used by physicists to describe the transport of matter by diffusion, the elastic deformations of solids, and the flow of fluids.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Behind Deep Blue’ by Feng-Hsiung Hsu

Updated 17 December 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Behind Deep Blue’ by Feng-Hsiung Hsu

On May 11, 1997, millions worldwide heard news of a stunning victory, as a machine defeated the defending world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.

“Behind Deep Blue” tells the inside story of the quest to create the mother of all chess machines and what happened at the two historic Deep Blue vs. Kasparov matches. Feng-hsiung Hsu, the system architect of Deep Blue, reveals how a modest student project started at Carnegie Mellon in 1985 led to the production of a multimillion-dollar supercomputer.