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Today’s AI largely lives in computers, but acting and reacting in the real world — that’s the realm of robots. In this week’s episode, co-host Steven Strogatz talks with pioneering roboticist Daniela Rus about creativity, collaboration, and the unusual forms robots of the future might take. The post Are Robots About to Level Up? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A long-awaited study of the cosmic expansion rate suggests that when it comes to the Hubble tension, cosmologists are still missing something. The post The Webb Telescope Further Deepens the Biggest Controversy in Cosmology first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new proof marks the first progress in decades on a problem about how order emerges from disorder. The post Grad Students Find Inevitable Patterns in Big Sets of Numbers first appeared on Quanta Magazine

You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better to avoid them. The post What Is Analog Computing? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences. The post What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Cryptography is the thread that connects Julius Caesar, World War II and quantum computing, and it now lies under nearly every part of modern life. In this week’s episode, computer scientist Boaz Barak and co-host Janna Levin discuss the past and future of secrecy. The post How Does Math Keep Secrets? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Experiments that test physics and philosophy "as a single whole" may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe. The post ‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program. The post Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture first appeared on Quanta Magazine

These metaphorical gardens have become central objects in modern mathematics. The post What Are Sheaves? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Common sense has been viewed as one of the hardest challenges in AI. That said, ChatGPT4 has acquired what some believe is an impressive sense of humanity. How is this possible? Listen to this week’s “The Joy of Why” with co-host Steven Strogatz. The post Will AI Ever Have Common Sense? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

At sea, biologists discovered microbial partners that together produce nitrogen, a nutrient essential for life. The pair are in the process of merging into a single organism. The post Tight-Knit Microbes Live Together to Make a Vital Nutrient first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The proof creates stricter limits on potential exceptions to the famous Riemann hypothesis. The post ‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results point to a new fundamental particle. The post What Could Explain the Gallium Anomaly? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently. The post How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time. The post What Is Machine Learning? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

If you cover a surface with tiles, repetitive patterns always emerge — or do they? In this week’s episode, mathematician Natalie Priebe Frank and co-host Janna Levin discuss how recent breakthroughs in tiling can unlock structural secrets in the natural world. The post What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

After decades of uncertainty, a motley team of programmers has proved precisely how complicated simple computer programs can get. The post With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a critical missing piece of the galactic puzzle. The post Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Two mathematicians have proved a long-standing conjecture that is a step on the way toward finding the worst shape for packing the plane. The post Why Is This Shape So Terrible to Pack? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research and kindling deep questions about why we do science. The post How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Useful mathematical concepts, like the number line, can linger for millennia before they are rigorously defined. The post How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number first appeared on Quanta Magazine

How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make the complex cosmos understandable? In this episode, the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and co-host Steven Strogatz explore the deep foundations of the scientific process. The post How Is Science Even Possible? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice. The post Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria. The post The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes first appeared on Quanta Magazine