How a DNA ‘Parasite’ May Have Fragmented Our Genes
A novel type of “jumping gene” may explain why the genomes of complex cells aren’t all...
Emmy Murphy Is a Mathematician Who Finds Beauty in Flexibility
The prize-winning geometer feels most fulfilled when exploring the fertile ground where constraint meets creation. The...
Wormhole Experiment Called Into Question
Last fall, a team of physicists announced that they had teleported a qubit through a holographic...
The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models
Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable...
Shadows in the Big Bang Afterglow Reveal Invisible Cosmic Structures
Cosmologists are using secondary signatures from the cosmic microwave background to map the universe’s hidden matter....
The Researcher Who Would Teach Machines to Be Fair
Arvind Narayanan uses quantitative methods to expose and correct the misuse of quantitative methods. The post...
Can We Program Our Cells?
By genetically instructing cells to perform tasks that they wouldn’t in nature, synthetic biologists can learn...
Room-Temperature Superconductor Discovery Meets With Resistance | Quanta Magazine
A paper in Nature reports the discovery of a superconductor that operates at room temperatures and...
Black Holes Will Destroy All Quantum States, Researchers Argue | Quanta Magazine
New calculations suggest that the event horizons around black holes will ‘decohere’ quantum possibilities — even...
Strange Solar Gamma Rays Discovered at Even Higher Energies
There appear to be too many gamma rays coming from the sun. New higher-energy measurements reveal...
Physicists Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy out of Nothing
The quantum energy teleportation protocol was proposed in 2008 and largely ignored. Now two independent experiments...
Quantum Field Theory Pries Open Mathematical Puzzle | Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians have struggled to understand the moduli space of graphs. A new paper uses tools from...
Mathematicians Complete Quest to Build ‘Spherical Cubes’
Is it possible to fill space “cubically” with shapes that act like spheres? A proof at...
How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities | Quanta Magazine
Richard Feynman’s path integral is both a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy about how the...
A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best | Quanta Magazine
The critical brain hypothesis suggests that neural networks do their best work when connections are not...
How Quantum Physicists ‘Flipped Time’ (and How They Didn’t)
Two teams have made photons act as if time were simultaneously flowing in two directions. The...
The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think | Quanta Magazine
Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is...
Mathematicians Find an Infinity of Possible Black Hole Shapes | Quanta Magazine
In three-dimensional space, the surface of a black hole must be a sphere. But a new...
Standard Model of Cosmology Survives a Telescope’s Surprising Finds
Reports that the James Webb Space Telescope killed the reigning cosmological model turn out to have...
Mathematicians Roll Dice and Get Rock-Paper-Scissors
Mathematicians have uncovered a surprising wealth of rock-paper-scissors-like patterns in randomly chosen dice. The post Mathematicians...
Finally, a Fast Algorithm for Shortest Paths on Negative Graphs | Quanta Magazine
Researchers can now find the shortest route through a network nearly as fast as theoretically possible,...
Mobile Genes From the Mother Shape the Baby’s Microbiome
Tiny genetic sequences in a mother’s bacteria seem to hop into the infant's bacteria, perhaps ensuring...
New Algorithm Closes Quantum Supremacy Window | Quanta Magazine
Random circuit sampling, a popular technique for showing the power of quantum computers, doesn’t scale up...
The Physics Principle That Inspired Modern AI Art | Quanta Magazine
Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes...
Inside Ancient Asteroids, Gamma Rays Made Building Blocks of Life | Quanta Magazine
A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in...
Google Researcher, Long Out of Math, Cracks Devilish Problem About Sets
On nights and weekends, Justin Gilmer attacked an old question in pure math using the tools...
The Biggest Math Breakthroughs in 2022 | Quanta Magazine
Four Fields Medals were awarded for major breakthroughs in geometry, combinatorics, statistical physics and number theory,...
The Year in Physics
In a year filled with sweet new observations in astronomy and tantalizing breakthroughs in condensed matter...
The Biggest Discoveries in Computer Science in 2022 | Quanta Magazine
Computer scientists this year learned how to transmit perfect secrets, why transformers seem so good at...
Major Biology Discoveries From 2022 | Quanta Magazine
Momentum for new ideas in Alzheimer’s research joined advances in neuroscience, developmental biology and origin-of-life studies...
‘Fullertubes’ Join the Family of Carbon Crystals
The buckminsterfullerene revolution never came, but some researchers are eagerly exploring the properties of newfound carbon...
She Finds Keys to Ecology in Cells That Steal From Others
The ecologist Holly Moeller studies microorganisms that expand their range by absorbing organelles and gaining new...
‘Nasty’ Geometry Breaks Decades-Old Tiling Conjecture | Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians predicted that if they imposed enough restrictions on how a shape might tile space, they...
How the Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions | Quanta Magazine
The neural representations of a perceived image and the memory of it are almost the same....
She Turns Fluids Into ‘Black Holes’ and ‘Inflating Universes’ | Quanta Magazine
By using fluids to model inaccessible realms of the cosmos, Silke Weinfurtner is “looking for a...
What Causes Alzheimer’s? Scientists Are Rethinking the Answer. | Quanta Magazine
After decades in the shadow of the reigning model for Alzheimer’s disease, alternative explanations are finally...
Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies | Quanta Magazine
Two new studies suggest that certain tetrahedral arrangements of galaxies outnumber their mirror images, potentially reflecting...