Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture | Quanta Magazine
In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part...
What Are Sheaves? | Quanta Magazine
These metaphorical gardens have become central objects in modern mathematics. The post What Are Sheaves? first...
Will AI Ever Have Common Sense? | Quanta Magazine
Common sense has been viewed as one of the hardest challenges in AI. That said, ChatGPT4...
Tight-Knit Microbes Live Together to Make a Vital Nutrient | Quanta Magazine
At sea, biologists discovered microbial partners that together produce nitrogen, a nutrient essential for life. The...
‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers | Quanta Magazine
The proof creates stricter limits on potential exceptions to the famous Riemann hypothesis. The post ‘Sensational’...
What Could Explain the Gallium Anomaly? | Quanta Magazine
Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment,...
How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold | Quanta Magazine
Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently. The post How America’s Fastest...
What Is Machine Learning? | Quanta Magazine
Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement...
What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us? | Quanta Magazine
If you cover a surface with tiles, repetitive patterns always emerge — or do they? In...
Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine | Quanta Magazine
After decades of uncertainty, a motley team of programmers has proved precisely how complicated simple computer...
Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy | Quanta Magazine
Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a...
Why Is This Shape So Terrible to Pack? | Quanta Magazine
Two mathematicians have proved a long-standing conjecture that is a step on the way toward finding...
How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It | Quanta Magazine
Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date,...
How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number | Quanta Magazine
Useful mathematical concepts, like the number line, can linger for millennia before they are rigorously defined....
How Is Science Even Possible? | Quanta Magazine
How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make...
Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time...
The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes | Quanta Magazine
Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and...
Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health? | Quanta Magazine
Research suggests that psychedelic drugs can reopen critical periods of brain development to create opportunities for...
Most Life on Earth is Dormant, After Pulling an ‘Emergency Brake’ | Quanta Magazine
Many microbes and cells are in deep sleep, waiting for the right moment to activate. Biologists...
Cryptographers Discover a New Foundation for Quantum Secrecy | Quanta Magazine
Researchers have proved that secure quantum encryption is possible in a world without hard problems. The...
Simple Equation Predicts the Shapes of Carbon-Capturing Wetlands | Quanta Magazine
To calculate the amount of carbon stored inside peatlands, researchers developed a unified theory of “bog...
What Happens in the Brain to Cause Depression? | Quanta Magazine
Drugs that target the neurotransmitter serotonin have long been prescribed to treat depression. Now the spotlight...
AI Needs Enormous Computing Power. Could Light-Based Chips Help? | Quanta Magazine
Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also...
Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture | Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians have disproved a major conjecture about the relationship between curvature and shape. The post Strangely...
How ‘Idle’ Egg Cells Defend Their DNA From Damage | Quanta Magazine
How do immature egg cells maintain genetic quality for decades before they mature? Scientists find unusual...
Game Theory Can Make AI More Correct and Efficient | Quanta Magazine
Researchers are drawing on ideas from game theory to improve large language models and make them...
New AI Tools Predict How Life’s Building Blocks Assemble | Quanta Magazine
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes...
Dogged Dark Matter Hunters Find New Hiding Places to Check | Quanta Magazine
Perhaps dark matter is made of an entirely different kind of particle than the ones physicists...
A Rosetta Stone for Mathematics | Quanta Magazine
In 1940 André Weil wrote a letter to his sister, Simone, outlining his vision for translating...
The Mystery of the Missing Multicellular Prokaryotes | Quanta Magazine
Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down...
Scientists Find a Fast Way to Describe Quantum Systems | Quanta Magazine
After years of false starts, a team of computer scientists has found a way to efficiently...
To Pack Spheres Tightly, Mathematicians Throw Them at Random | Quanta Magazine
Four mathematicians broke a 75-year-old record by finding a denser way to pack high-dimensional spheres. The...
How a NASA Probe Solved a Scorching Solar Mystery | Quanta Magazine
The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface....
Does AI Know What an Apple Is? She Aims to Find Out. | Quanta Magazine
The computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “meaning” into concrete, testable ideas....
What Does Milk Do for Babies? | Quanta Magazine
Human nutrition begins with milk, but the wondrous biofluid does much more than feed babies. In...
Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’ | Quanta Magazine
More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced...
AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities | Quanta Magazine
Using machine learning, string theorists are finally showing how microscopic configurations of extra dimensions translate into...
Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions | Quanta Magazine
Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional...
Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare | Quanta Magazine
A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that...
Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier | Quanta Magazine
Researchers have shown how to find the simplest description of a data set faster than by...
Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft | Quanta Magazine
Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser...
Pleasure or Pain? He Maps the Neural Circuits That Decide. | Quanta Magazine
The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely...
Geometers Engineer New Tools to Wrangle Spacecraft Orbits | Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians think abstract tools from a field called symplectic geometry might help with planning missions to...
How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? | Quanta Magazine
By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. The post...
My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine | Quanta Magazine
Founding editor-in-chief Thomas Lin looks back at a decade of Quanta journalism and forward to what’s...
Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life | Quanta Magazine
New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues,...
Can Information Escape a Black Hole? | Quanta Magazine
Black holes are inescapable traps for most of what falls into them — but there can...
Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award | Quanta Magazine
The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers,...
Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound | Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians have struggled to prove Falconer’s Conjecture, a simple, but far-reaching, hypothesis about the distances between...
How the Ancient Art of Eclipse Prediction Became an Exact Science | Quanta Magazine
The timing of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024, will be known to within a...