Getting good at LeetCode Java can feel like a puzzle sometimes, right? You see all these problems, and you’re not sure where ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

Detectives often find important clues by digging through rubbish. That approach paid off tremendously for systems biologist Yifat Merbl. When she and her team investigated cellular recycling centres ...