Evolving Bacteria Can Evade Barriers to ‘Peak’ Fitness | Quanta Magazine
Paradoxically, natural selection can sometimes seem to block organisms from evolving useful adaptations. But a new...
Pierre de Fermat’s Link to a High School Student’s Prime Math Proof | Quanta Magazine
How Fermat’s less famous "little theorem" got mathematicians young and old to play with prime-like Carmichael...
In the Gut’s ‘Second Brain,’ Key Agents of Health Emerge | Quanta Magazine
Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key...
Researchers Refute a Widespread Belief About Online Algorithms
Three computer scientists have disproved a long-standing conjecture about a fundamental problem involving imperfect information. The...
The Astonishing Behavior of Recursive Sequences
Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have...
Google DeepMind Trains ‘Artificial Brainstorming’ in Chess AI | Quanta Magazine
By bringing together disparate approaches, machines can reach a new level of creative problem-solving. The post...
Rogue Worlds Throw Planetary Ideas Out of Orbit
Scientists have recently discovered scores of free-floating worlds that defy classification. The new observations have forced...
Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better
The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new...
The Scientist Who Decodes the Songs of Undersea Volcanoes
In the rumbles and groans of underwater volcanoes, Jackie Caplan-Auerbach finds her favorite harmonies — and...
Cryptographers Devise an Approach for Total Search Privacy | Quanta Magazine
Three researchers have found a long-sought way to pull information from large databases secretly, moving us...
These Moons Are Dark and Frozen. So How Can They Have Oceans?
The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn appear to have subsurface oceans — tantalizing targets in the...
The Hidden Connection That Changed Number Theory
Quadratic reciprocity lurks around many corners in mathematics. By proving it, number theorists reimagined their whole...
A Brief History of Tricky Mathematical Tiling | Quanta Magazine
The discovery earlier this year of the “hat” tile marked the culmination of hundreds of years...
A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers
New work attacks a long-standing barrier to understanding how prime numbers are distributed. The post A...
Biophysicists Uncover Powerful Symmetries in Living Tissue | Quanta Magazine
After identifying interlocking symmetries in mammalian cells, scientists can describe some tissues as liquid crystals —...
The Computing Pioneer Helping AI See
Alexei Efros has spent his career learning how machines see differently from humans. Now he’s helping...
The Quest to Quantify Quantumness | Quanta Magazine
What makes a quantum computer more powerful than a classical computer? It’s a surprisingly subtle question...
These Cells Spark Electricity in the Brain. They’re Not Neurons.
For decades, researchers have debated whether brain cells called astrocytes can signal like neurons. Researchers recently...
Thirty Years Later, a Speed Boost for Quantum Factoring | Quanta Magazine
Shor’s algorithm will enable future quantum computers to factor large numbers quickly, undermining many online security...
The Mathematician Who Shaped String Theory | Quanta Magazine
Eugenio Calabi, who died on September 25, conceived of novel geometric objects that later became fundamental...
The Deep Link Equating Math Proofs and Computer Programs | Quanta Magazine
Mathematical logic and the code of computer programs are, in an exact way, mirror images of...
Invisible Electron ‘Demon’ Discovered in Odd Superconductor | Quanta Magazine
Physicists have long suspected that hunks of metal could vibrate in a peculiar way that would...
Tiny Language Models Thrive With GPT-4 as a Teacher | Quanta Magazine
To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic...
Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize | Quanta Magazine
The development of attosecond pulses of light allowed researchers to explore the frame-by-frame movement of electrons....
How Simple Math Moves the Needle | Quanta Magazine
The spatial intuition behind a three-point turn offers an on-ramp to a century-old geometry problem. The...
Mathematicians Cross the Line to Get to the Point | Quanta Magazine
A new paper establishes a long-conjectured bound about the size of the overlap between sets of...
The Experimental Cosmologist Hunting for the First Sunrise | Quanta Magazine
To catch even a whiff of the universe’s earliest epochs — an age of darkness, and...
What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells | Quanta Magazine
Every species develops at its own unique tempo, leaving scientists to wonder what governs their timing....
‘Species Repulsion’ Enables High Biodiversity in Tropical Trees | Quanta Magazine
Because tree seedlings don’t grow as well when close to their parents, more tree species can...
A Tower of Conjectures That Rests Upon a Needle
On its surface, the Kakeya conjecture is a simple statement about rotating needles. But it underlies...
The Biggest Smallest Triangle Just Got Smaller | Quanta Magazine
A new proof breaks a decades-long drought of progress on the problem of estimating the size...
Magnetism May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry
The preferred “handedness” of biomolecules could have emerged from biased interactions between electrons and magnetic surfaces,...
Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking
Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal...
Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact | Quanta Magazine
Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite...
The Hidden Brain Connections Between Our Hands and Tongues | Quanta Magazine
Sticking out your tongue while doing delicate work with your hands reveals a history of evolutionary...
New Codes Could Make Quantum Computing 10 Times More Efficient | Quanta Magazine
Quantum computing is still really, really hard. But the rise of a powerful class of error-correcting...
What a Contest of Consciousness Theories Really Proved | Quanta Magazine
A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an...
An Old Conjecture Falls, Making Spheres a Lot More Complicated | Quanta Magazine
The telescope conjecture gave mathematicians a handle on ways to map one sphere to another. Now...
Quaking Giants Might Solve the Mysteries of Stellar Magnetism
In their jiggles and shakes, red giant stars encode a record of the magnetic fields near...
Andreas Wagner Pursues the Secrets to Evolutionary Success
Why did mammals, grasses and some other groups of organisms explode in diversity only after millions...
Risky Giant Steps Can Solve Optimization Problems Faster | Quanta Magazine
New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm. The post Risky...
Two Students Unravel a Widely Believed Math Conjecture | Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians thought they were on the cusp of proving a conjecture about the ancient structures known...
Even Synthetic Life Forms With a Tiny Genome Can Evolve | Quanta Magazine
By watching “minimal” cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can...
Exoplanets Could Help Us Learn How Planets Make Magnetism | Quanta Magazine
New observations of a faraway rocky world that might have its own magnetic field could help...