Twitter: @QuantaMagazine (followed by 98 science writers)
Site: www.quantamagazine.org/tag/podcast
209 episodes
2015 to present
Average episode: 20 minutes
Open in Apple Podcasts • RSS
Categories: Math • Multidisciplinary • Physics • Story-Style
Podcaster's summary: Listen to Quanta Magazine's in-depth news stories about developments in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences. Quanta, an editorially independent magazine published by the Simons Foundation, seeks to enhance public understanding of basic research. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org.
| Episodes |
| 2023-Mar-15 • 19 minutes How Supergenes Fuel Evolution Despite Harmful Mutations Supergenes that lock inherited traits together are widespread in nature. Recent work shows that their blend of genetic benefits and risks for species can be complex. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Chee Zee Jungle – Primal Drive” by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2023-Mar-01 • 12 minutes Brightest-Ever Space Explosion Reveals Possible Hints of Dark Matter A recent gamma-ray burst known as the BOAT — “brightest of all time” — appears to have produced a high-energy particle that shouldn’t exist. For some, dark matter provides the explanation. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Pulse” by Geographer. |
| 2023-Feb-16 • 17 minutes Inside the Proton, the 'Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine' The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Light Gazing” by Andrew Langdon. |
| 2023-Feb-01 • 15 minutes High-Temperature Superconductivity Understood at Last A new atomic-scale experiment all but settles the origin of the strong form of superconductivity seen in cuprate crystals, confirming a 35-year-old theory. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Quasi Motion” by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2023-Jan-18 • 20 minutes Record-Breaking Robot Highlights How Animals Excel at Jumping Robots can surpass the limitations on how high and far animals can jump, but their success only underscores nature’s ingenuity in making the most of what’s available. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Pixel Peeker Polka” by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2023-Jan-04 • 20 minutes A Good Memory or a Bad One? One Brain Molecule Decides. When the brain encodes memories as positive or negative, one molecule determines which way they will go. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Retro” by Wayne Jones. |
| 2022-Dec-21 • 21 minutes Old Problem About Mathematical Curves Falls to Young Couple Eric Larson and Isabel Vogt have solved the interpolation problem — a centuries-old question about some of the most basic objects in geometry. Some credit goes to the chalkboard in their living room. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Good Times” by Patrick Patrikios. |
| 2022-Dec-07 • 17 minutes How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Pulse” by Geographer. |
| 2022-Nov-23 • 18 minutes Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight Partnerships between engineers and biologists have begun to reveal how birds evolved their superb maneuverability. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Running Out” by Patrick Patrikios. |
| 2022-Nov-09 • 17 minutes How the 'Diamond of the Plant World' Helped Land Plants Evolve Structural studies of the robust material called sporopollenin reveal how it made plants hardy enough to reproduce on dry land. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is “Redwood Trail” by Audionautix. |
| 2022-Oct-26 • 23 minutes Protein Blobs Linked to Alzheimer's Affect Aging in All Cells A first-of-its-kind study offers a fresh perspective on what happens inside cells as they age. |
| 2022-Oct-12 • 18 minutes The Brain Has a 'Low-Power Mode' That Blunts Our Senses Neuroscientists uncovered an energy-saving mode in vision-system neurons that works at the cost of being able to see fine-grained details. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Unanswered Questions" by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2022-Sep-28 • 18 minutes Researchers Achieve 'Absurdly Fast' Algorithm for Network Flow Mathematicians recently figured out a near-optimal way to go with the flow. |
| 2022-Sep-14 • 13 minutes Graduate Student's Side Project Proves Prime Number Conjecture A graduate student recently proved Paul Erdős' conjecture about what makes the prime numbers particularly unique among primitive sets. |
| 2022-Aug-31 • 27 minutes Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information. |
| 2022-Aug-17 • 23 minutes Secrets of the Moon's Permanent Shadows Are Coming to Light Robots are about to venture into the sunless depths of lunar craters to investigate ancient water ice trapped there, while remote studies find hints about how water arrives on rocky worlds. Read more and explore infographics at quantamagazine.org. |
| 2022-Aug-03 • 22 minutes Deep Learning Poised to 'Blow Up' Famed Fluid Equations For centuries, mathematicians have tried to prove that Euler's fluid equations can produce nonsensical answers. A new approach to machine learning has researchers betting that "blowup" is near. Read more at quantamagazine.org. Music is "Pulse" by Geographer. |
| 2022-Jul-19 • 22 minutes Researchers Identify 'Master Problem' Underlying All Cryptography The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity. |
| 2022-Jul-06 • 17 minutes Brain Chemical Helps Signal to Neurons When to Start a Movement Dopamine, a neurochemical often associated with reward behavior, also seems to help organize precisely when the brain initiates movements. It's the latest revelation about the power of neuromodulators. |
| 2022-Jun-22 • 25 minutes This Animal's Behavior Is Mechanically Programmed Biomechanical interactions, rather than neurons, control the movements of one of the simplest animals. The discovery offers a glimpse into how animal behavior worked before neurons evolved. |
| 2022-Jun-08 • 16 minutes Tiny Galaxies Reveal Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes Dwarf galaxies weren't supposed to have big black holes. Their surprise discovery has revealed clues about how the universe's biggest black holes could have formed. |
| 2022-May-25 • 40 minutes A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature's Laws To explain "naturalness," physicists are rethinking some of their core assumptions about the way that nature works. |
| 2022-May-11 • 20 minutes New Map of Meaning in the Brain Changes Ideas About Memory Researchers have mapped hundreds of semantic categories to the tiny bits of the cortex that represent them in our thoughts and perceptions. What they discovered might change our view of memory. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2022-Apr-27 • 21 minutes Machine Learning Gets a Quantum Speedup Two teams have shown how quantum approaches can solve problems faster than classical computers, bringing physics and computer science closer together. |
| 2022-Apr-14 • 18 minutes Secrets of Early Animal Evolution Revealed by Chromosome 'Tectonics' Just as plate tectonics makes sense of the geology and positions of continents, "genome tectonics" helps biologists reconstruct the genomic duplications, fusions and translocations that created the chromosomes we see today. |
| 2022-Mar-31 • 25 minutes A Solution to the Faint-Sun Paradox Reveals a Narrow Window for Life When the sun was 30% dimmer, Earth seems like it should have been inhospitably frozen, but new work suggests that dimness may be why life exists here at all. |
| 2022-Mar-18 • 25 minutes Evolution 'Landscapes' Predict What's Next for COVID Virus By mapping in three dimensions how various mutations affect the fitness of the coronavirus, researchers can get insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic might change next. |
| 2022-Mar-03 • 17 minutes Flying Fish and Aquarium Pets Yield Secrets of Evolution New studies reveal the ancient, shared genetic "grammar" underpinning the diverse evolution of fish fins and tetrapod limbs. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Hidden Agenda" by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2022-Feb-17 • 21 minutes Mathematicians Outwit Hidden Number Conspiracy Decades ago, a mathematician posed a warmup problem for some of the most difficult questions about prime numbers. It turned out to be just as difficult to solve, until now. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Aimless Amos" by Rondo Brothers. |
| 2022-Feb-03 • 17 minutes Mathematician Hurls Structure and Disorder Into Century-Old Problem A new paper shows how to create longer disordered strings than mathematicians had thought possible, proving that a well-known recent conjecture is "spectacularly wrong." Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Transmission" by John Deley and the 41 Players. |
| 2022-Jan-20 • 24 minutes Researchers Defeat Randomness to Create Ideal Code By carefully constructing a multidimensional and well-connected graph, a team of researchers has finally created a long-sought locally testable code that can immediately reveal whether it's been corrupted. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Clover 3" by Vibe Mountain. |
| 2022-Jan-06 • 19 minutes The Brain Processes Speech in Parallel With Other Sounds Scientists thought that the brain's hearing centers might just process speech along with other sounds. But new work suggests that speech gets some special treatment very early on. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Thought Bot" by Audionautix. |
| 2021-Dec-23 • 25 minutes Biologists Rethink the Logic Behind Cells' Molecular Signals The molecular signaling systems of complex cells are nothing like simple electronic circuits. The logic governing their operation is riotously complex - but it has advantages. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Unanswered Questions" by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2021-Dec-09 • 23 minutes A Massive Subterranean ‘Tree’ Is Moving Magma to Earth’s Surface Deep in the mantle, a branching plume of intensely hot material appears to be the engine powering vast volcanic activity. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Dark Toys" by SYBS. |
| 2021-Nov-24 • 22 minutes One Lab’s Quest to Build Space-Time Out of Quantum Particles For over two decades, physicists have pondered how the fabric of space-time may emerge from some kind of quantum entanglement. In Monika Schleier-Smith's lab at Stanford University, the thought experiment is becoming real. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Clover 3" by Vibe Mountain. |
| 2021-Nov-11 • 18 minutes The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks Studies of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations - as well as insights into the nature of time itself. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Aimless Amos" by Rondo Brothers. |
| 2021-Oct-28 • 27 minutes The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are emerging. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Pulse" by Geographer. |
| 2021-Oct-14 • 22 minutes Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Cast of Pods" by Doug Maxwell. |
| 2021-Sep-30 • 28 minutes How Many Numbers Exist? Infinity Proof Moves Math Closer to an Answer. For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise. The post How Many Numbers Exist? Infinity Proof Moves Math Closer to an Answer. first appeared on Quanta Magazine |
| 2021-Sep-16 • 15 minutes DNA Has Four Bases. Some Viruses Swap in a Fifth. The DNA of some viruses doesn't use the same four nucleotide bases found in all other life. New work shows how this exception is possible and hints that it could be more common than we think. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Hidden Agenda" by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2021-Sep-02 • 37 minutes The Mystery at the Heart of Physics That Only Math Can Solve The accelerating effort to understand the mathematics of quantum field theory will have profound consequences for both math and physics. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Pulse" by Geographer. |
| 2021-Aug-19 • 24 minutes Radioactivity May Fuel Life Deep Underground and Inside Other Worlds New work suggests that the radiolytic splitting of water supports giant subsurface ecosystems of life on Earth — and could do it elsewhere, too. The post Radioactivity May Fuel Life Deep Underground and Inside Other Worlds first appeared on Quanta Magazine |
| 2021-Aug-05 • 24 minutes DNA of Giant ‘Corpse Flower’ Parasite Surprises Biologists The bizarre genome of the world's most mysterious flowering plants shows how far parasites will go in stealing, deleting and duplicating DNA. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Who's Using Who" by the Mini Vandals. |
| 2021-Jul-22 • 21 minutes Scientists Pin Down When Earth’s Crust Cracked, Then Came to Life New data indicating that Earth's surface broke up about 3.2 billion years ago helps clarify how plate tectonics drove the evolution of complex life. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Pulse" by Geographer. |
| 2021-Jul-08 • 21 minutes A New Twist Reveals Superconductivity’s Secrets An unexpected superconductor was beginning to look like a fluke, but a new theory and a second discovery have revealed that emergent quasiparticles may be behind the effect. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Racing the Clock" by The Green Orbs. |
| 2021-Jun-24 • 22 minutes Statistics Postdoc Tames Decades-Old Geometry Problem To the surprise of experts in the field, a postdoctoral statistician has solved one of the most important problems in high-dimensional convex geometry. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Transmission" by John Deley and the 41 Players. |
| 2021-Jun-10 • 26 minutes Mathematicians Set Numbers in Motion to Unlock Their Secrets A new proof demonstrates the power of arithmetic dynamics, an emerging discipline that combines insights from number theory and dynamical systems. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Pulse" by Geographer. |
| 2021-May-27 • 20 minutes Artificial Neural Nets Finally Yield Clues to How Brains Learn The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn't work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Telepathic Drive" by Unicorn Heads. |
| 2021-May-13 • 29 minutes Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Hold Clues to Persistent Mysteries By digging out signals hidden within the brain's electrical chatter, scientists are getting new insights into sleep, aging and more. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Thought Bot" by Audionautix. |
| 2021-Apr-29 • 22 minutes Rumbles on Mars Raise Hopes of Underground Magma Flows Small and cold, Mars has long been considered a dead planet. But a series of recent discoveries has forced scientists to rethink how recently its insides stopped churning - if they ever stopped at all. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Pulse" by Geographer. |
| 2021-Apr-15 • 20 minutes Mathematicians Resurrect Hilbert’s 13th Problem Long considered solved, David Hilbert's question about seventh-degree polynomials is leading researchers to a new web of mathematical connections. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Confusing Disco" by Birocratic. |
| 2021-Apr-01 • 28 minutes A Newfound Source of Cellular Order in the Chemistry of Life Inside cells, droplets of biomolecules called condensates merge, divide and dissolve. Their dance may regulate vital processes. The post A Newfound Source of Cellular Order in the Chemistry of Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine |
| 2021-Mar-18 • 13 minutes The Mystery of Mistletoe’s Missing Genes Mistletoes have all but shut down the powerhouses of their cells. Scientists are still trying to understand the plants' unorthodox survival strategy. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Sugar Zone" by Silent Partner. |
| 2021-Mar-04 • 16 minutes The New History of the Milky Way Over the past two years, astronomers have rewritten the story of our galaxy. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Cast of Pods" by Doug Maxwell. |
| 2021-Feb-18 • 23 minutes Scientists Uncover the Universal Geometry of Geology An exercise in pure mathematics has led to a wide-ranging theory of how the world comes together. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Sugar Zone" by Silent Partner. |
| 2021-Feb-04 • 38 minutes The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "The Banquet" by Hainbach. |
| 2021-Jan-21 • 23 minutes Quantum Tunnels Show How Particles Can Break the Speed of Light Recent experiments show that particles should be able to go faster than light when they quantum mechanically "tunnel" through walls. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Good Times" by Patrick Patrikios. |
| 2021-Jan-07 • 19 minutes Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record After 44 years, there's finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Who's Using Who" by The Mini Vandals. |
| 2020-Dec-16 • 18 minutes Mitochondria May Hold Keys to Anxiety and Mental Health Research hints that the energy-generating organelles of cells may play a surprisingly pivotal role in mediating anxiety and depression. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Good Times" by Patrick Patrikios. |
| 2020-Dec-03 • 22 minutes The Hidden Magnetic Universe Begins to Come Into View Astronomers are discovering that magnetic fields permeate much of the cosmos. If these fields date back to the Big Bang, they could solve a major cosmological mystery. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "The Joint is Jumpin" by Joel Cummins. |
| 2020-Nov-19 • 17 minutes Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem It took a graduate student less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Retro" by Wayne Jones. |
| 2020-Nov-05 • 19 minutes The Grand Unified Theory of Rogue Waves Rogue waves - enigmatic giants of the sea - were thought to be caused by two different mechanisms. But a new idea that borrows from the hinterlands of probability theory has the potential to predict them all. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Fire Water" by Saidbysed. |
| 2020-Oct-22 • 17 minutes Hidden Computational Power Found in the Arms of Neurons The dendritic arms of some human neurons can perform logic operations that once seemed to require whole neural networks. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Thought Bot" by Audionautix. |
| 2020-Oct-08 • 18 minutes Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math Three physicists wanted to calculate how neutrinos change. They ended up discovering an unexpected relationship between some of the most ubiquitous objects in math. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Fire Water" by Saidbysed. |
| 2020-Sep-24 • 31 minutes Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand? A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. But it's also revealed how far AI has to go. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "If I Had a Chicken" by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2020-Sep-10 • 16 minutes How Jurassic Plankton Stole Control of the Ocean’s Chemistry Only 170 million years ago, new plankton evolved. Their demand for carbon and calcium permanently transformed the seas as homes for life. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Fire Water" by Saidbysed. |
| 2020-Aug-27 • 19 minutes To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight A brain circuit that suppresses distracting sensory information holds important clues about attention and other cognitive processes. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Aimless Amos" by the Rondo Brothers. |
| 2020-Aug-12 • 20 minutes Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins Modern humans and more ancient hominins interbred many times throughout Eurasia and Africa, and the genetic flow went both ways. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2020-Jul-30 • 16 minutes For Embryo’s Cells, Size Can Determine Fate New research suggests that many embryonic cells commit to a developmental fate when they become too small to divide unevenly anymore. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Good Times" by Patrick Patrikios. |
| 2020-Jul-16 • 19 minutes Scientists Debate the Origin of Cell Types in the First Animals Theories about how animals became multicellular are shifting as researchers find greater complexity in our single-celled ancestors. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Light Gazing" by Andrew Langdon. |
| 2020-Jul-02 • 15 minutes Wandering Space Rocks Help Solve Mysteries of Planet Formation After an interstellar asteroid shot past the sun, scientists realized that there's probably a lot of itinerant rocks out there. Those stones are changing what we know about the birth of solar systems. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Clover 3" by Vibe Mountain. |
| 2020-Jun-18 • 12 minutes Random Surfaces Hide an Intricate Order During development, cells seem to decode their fate through optimal information processing, which could hint at a more general principle of life. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Desert Caravan" by Aaron Kenny. |
| 2020-Jun-04 • 16 minutes Where We See Shapes, AI Sees Textures To researchers' surprise, deep learning vision algorithms often fail at classifying images because they mostly take cues from textures, not shapes. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Retro" by Wayne Jones. |
| 2020-May-21 • 25 minutes What’s in a Name? Taxonomy Problems Vex Biologists Researchers struggle to incorporate ongoing evolutionary discoveries into an animal classification scheme older than Darwin. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Light Gazing" by Andrew Langdon. |
| 2020-May-07 • 21 minutes Bacterial Complexity Revises Ideas About ‘Which Came First?’ Contrary to popular belief, bacteria have organelles too. Scientists are now studying them for insights into how complex cells evolved. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Aimless Amos" by Rondo Brothers. |
| 2020-Apr-23 • 24 minutes Ancient DNA Yields Snapshots of Vanished Ecosystems Surviving fragments of genetic material preserved in sediments allow metagenomics researchers to see the full diversity of past life - even microbes. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Light Gazing" by Andrew Langdon. |
| 2020-Apr-09 • 17 minutes Computer Scientists Expand the Frontier of Verifiable Knowledge The universe of problems that a computer can check has grown. The researchers' secret ingredient? Quantum entanglement. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Desert Caravan" by Aaron Kenny. |
| 2020-Mar-26 • 19 minutes The Hidden Heroines of Chaos Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory. Their previously untold story illustrates the changing status of computation in science. |
| 2020-Mar-12 • 28 minutes Heat-Loving Microbes, Once Dormant, Thrive Over Decades-Old Fire In harsh ecosystems around the world, microbiologists are finding evidence that "microbial seed banks" protect biodiversity from changing conditions. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Fire Water" by Saidbysed. |
| 2020-Feb-27 • 24 minutes Scientists Discover Exotic New Patterns of Synchronization In a world seemingly filled with chaos, physicists have discovered new forms of synchronization and are learning how to predict and control them. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Slow Burn" by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2020-Feb-06 • 12 minutes Cryptography That Is Provably Secure Researchers have just released cryptographic code that's less likely to be hacked. The programs have nearly the same level of invincibility as a mathematical proof. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Light Gazing" by Andrew Langdon. |
| 2020-Jan-30 • 17 minutes The Math That Tells Cells What They Are During development, cells seem to decode their fate through optimal information processing, which could hint at a more general principle of life. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Retro" by Wayne Jones. |
| 2020-Jan-16 • 22 minutes How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science The latest AI algorithms are probing the evolution of galaxies, calculating quantum wave functions, discovering new chemical compounds and more. Is there anything that scientists do that can't be automated? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2020-Jan-02 • 26 minutes A World Without Clouds A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth's climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Clover 3" by Vibe Mountain. |
| 2019-Dec-19 • 16 minutes How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past The brain can't directly encode the passage of time, but recent work hints at a workaround for putting timestamps on memories of events. |
| 2019-Dec-05 • 17 minutes Foundations Built for a General Theory of Neural Networks Neural networks can be as unpredictable as they are powerful. Now mathematicians are beginning to reveal how a neural network's form will influence its function. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Telepathic Drive" by Unicorn Heads. |
| 2019-Nov-21 • 25 minutes The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Pulse" by Geographer. Special thanks to ©Nobel Media AB, production SVT/UR for Nobel Prize lecture audio. |
| 2019-Nov-07 • 11 minutes Milestone Experiment Proves Quantum Communication Really Is Faster In a Paris lab, researchers have shown for the first time that quantum methods of transmitting information are superior to classical ones. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Telepathic Drive" by Unicorn Heads. |
| 2019-Oct-31 • 19 minutes Mathematical Simplicity May Drive Evolution’s Speed Computer scientists are looking to evolutionary biology for inspiration in the search for optimal solutions among astronomically huge sets of possibilities. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Dark Toys" by SYBS. |
| 2019-Sep-26 • 25 minutes Should Evolution Treat Our Microbes as Part of Us? How does evolution select the fittest "individuals" when they are ecosystems made up of hosts and their microbiomes? Biologists debate the need to revise theories. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Chee Zee Jungle - Primal Drive" by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2019-Sep-26 • 15 minutes A Universal Law for the ‘Blood of the Earth’ Simple physical principles can be used to describe how rivers grow everywhere from Florida to Mars. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Redwood Trail" by Audionautix. |
| 2019-Sep-06 • 12 minutes Amateur Mathematician Finds Smallest Universal Cover Through exacting geometric calculations, Philip Gibbs has found the smallest known cover for any possible shape. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Valerie Plain" by Rondo Brothers. |
| 2019-Aug-29 • 15 minutes In the Nucleus, Genes’ Activity Might Depend on Their Location Using a new CRISPR-based technique, researchers are examining how the position of DNA within the nucleus affects gene expression and cell function. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Sugar Zone" by Silent Partner. |
| 2019-Aug-15 • 12 minutes Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room A visual prank exposes an Achilles' heel of computer vision systems: Unlike humans, they can't do a double take. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Quasi Motion" by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2019-Aug-01 • 20 minutes The New Science of Seeing Around Corners Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what's being said and faint images of what's around a corner. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Confusing Disco" by Birocratic. |
| 2019-Jul-18 • 14 minutes Major Quantum Computing Advance Made Obsolete by Teenager Teenager Ewin Tang has proven that classical computers can solve the "recommendation problem" nearly as fast as quantum computers. The result eliminates one of the best examples of quantum speedup. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Retro" by Wayne Jones. |
| 2019-Jul-05 • 24 minutes A Math Theory for Why People Hallucinate Psychedelic drugs can trigger characteristic hallucinations, which have long been thought to hold clues about the brain's circuitry. After nearly a century of study, a possible explanation is crystallizing. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is "Retro" by Wayne Jones. |
| 2019-Jun-20 • 18 minutes Closed Loophole Confirms the Unreality of the Quantum World A quickly closed loophole has proved that the "great smoky dragon" of quantum mechanics may forever elude capture. |
| 2019-Jun-06 • 20 minutes To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget Researchers find evidence that neural systems actively remove memories, which suggests that forgetting may be the default mode of the brain. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by The Green Orbs. |
| 2019-May-23 • 26 minutes The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called "octonions." Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2019-May-09 • 30 minutes To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future A controversial theory suggests that perception, motor control, memory and other brain functions all depend on comparisons between ongoing actual experiences and the brain's modeled expectations. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Everet Almond. |
| 2019-Apr-25 • 12 minutes Finally, a Problem That Only Quantum Computers Will Ever Be Able to Solve Computer scientists have been searching for years for a type of problem that a quantum computer can solve but that any possible future classical computer cannot. Now they've found one. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Vibe Mountain. |
| 2019-Apr-11 • 27 minutes Why Earth’s Cracked Crust May Be Essential for Life Life needs more than water alone. Recent discoveries suggest that plate tectonics has played a critical role in nourishing life on Earth. The findings carry major consequences for the search for life elsewhere in the universe. Music by Audionautix. |
| 2019-Mar-28 • 14 minutes Overtaxed Working Memory Knocks the Brain Out of Sync Researchers find that when working memory gets overburdened, dialogue between three brain regions breaks down. The discovery provides new support for a broader theory about how the brain operates. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by SYBS. |
| 2019-Mar-14 • 9 minutes A New World’s Extraordinary Orbit Points to Planet Nine Astronomers argue that there's an undiscovered giant planet far beyond the orbit of Neptune. A newly discovered rocky body has added evidence to the circumstantial case for it. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2019-Feb-28 • 17 minutes A Thermodynamic Answer to Why Birds Migrate New modeling studies suggest that birds migrate to strike a favorable balance between their input and output of energy. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2019-Feb-14 • 20 minutes Machine Learning’s ‘Amazing’ Ability to Predict Chaos In new computer experiments, artificial-intelligence algorithms can tell the future of chaotic systems. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2019-Jan-31 • 9 minutes Decades-Old Graph Problem Yields to Amateur Mathematician By making the first progress on the "chromatic number of the plane" problem in over 60 years, an anti-aging pundit has achieved mathematical immortality. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2019-Jan-03 • 17 minutes To Test Einstein’s Equations, Poke a Black Hole Two teams of researchers have made significant progress toward proving the black hole stability conjecture, a critical mathematical test of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Vibe Mountain. |
| 2019-Jan-03 • 17 minutes Oxygen and Stem Cells May Have Reshaped Early Complex Animals An unlikely team offers a controversial hypothesis about what enabled animal life to get more complex and diverse during the Cambrian explosion. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Doug Maxwell. |
| 2018-Dec-06 • 21 minutes Physicists Find a Way to See the ‘Grin’ of Quantum Gravity A recently proposed experiment would confirm that gravity is a quantum force. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2018-Nov-22 • 66 minutes Quanta Writers and Editors Discuss Trends in Science and Math Join writers and editors from Quanta Magazine for a stimulating panel discussion on the biggest ideas in math and science presented in two new books: Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire and The Prime Number Conspiracy. Panelists will discuss whether our universe is "natural," the nature of time, the origin and evolution of life, the role of mathematics in science and society, and where all these questions are taking us. |
| 2018-Nov-08 • 11 minutes Why Don’t Patients Get Sick in Sync? Modelers Find Statistical Clues. The long, variable times that some diseases incubate after infection defies simple explanation. An idealized model of tumor growth offers a statistical solution. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Audionautix. |
| 2018-Oct-25 • 21 minutes Why Artificial Intelligence Like AlphaZero Has Trouble With the Real World The latest artificial intelligence systems start from zero knowledge of a game and grow to world-beating in a matter of hours. But researchers are struggling to apply these systems beyond the arcade. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Ethan Meixsell. |
| 2018-Oct-11 • 22 minutes Scant Evidence of Power Laws Found in Real-World Networks A new study challenges one of the most celebrated and controversial ideas in network science. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by South London HiFi. |
| 2018-Sep-27 • 16 minutes Smart Swarms Seek New Ways to Cooperate New algorithms show how swarms of very simple robots can be made to work together as a group. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Doug Maxwell. |
| 2018-Aug-30 • 22 minutes How the Universe Got Its Bounce Back Cosmologists have shown that it's theoretically possible for a contracting universe to bounce and expand. The new work resuscitates an old idea that directly challenges the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Geographer. |
| 2018-Aug-09 • 17 minutes A Domesticated Dingo? No, but Some Are Getting Less Wild Near an Australian desert mining camp, wild dingoes are losing their fear of humans. Their genetic and behavioral changes may echo those from the domestication of dogs. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2018-Jul-05 • 20 minutes Fossil Discoveries Challenge Ideas About Earth’s Start A series of fossil finds suggests that life on Earth started earlier than anyone thought, calling into question a widely held theory of the solar system's beginnings. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Jun-21 • 17 minutes Mathematicians Find Wrinkle in Famed Fluid Equations Two mathematicians prove that under certain extreme conditions, the Navier-Stokes equations output nonsense. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Jun-07 • 16 minutes Light-Triggered Genes Reveal the Hidden Workings of Memory Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa's lab is overturning old assumptions about how memories form, how recall works and whether lost memories might be restored from "silent engrams." Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-May-31 • 20 minutes Secret Link Uncovered Between Pure Math and Physics An eminent mathematician reveals that his advances in the study of millennia-old mathematical questions owe to concepts derived from physics. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org https://www.quantamagazine.org/secret-link-uncovered-between-pure-math-and-physi... |
| 2018-May-10 • 9 minutes How Bacteria Help Regulate Blood Pressure Kidneys sniff out signals from gut bacteria for cues to moderate blood pressure after meals. Our understanding of how symbiotic microbes affect health is becoming much more molecular. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Apr-26 • 15 minutes Choosy Eggs May Pick Sperm for Their Genes, Defying Mendel’s Law The oldest law of genetics says that gametes combine randomly, but experiments hint that sometimes eggs select sperm actively for their genetic assets. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Apr-12 • 10 minutes A Zombie Gene Protects Elephants From Cancer Elephants did not evolve to become huge animals until after they turned a bit of genetic junk into a unique defense against inevitable tumors. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Mar-29 • 16 minutes Best-Ever Algorithm Found for Huge Streams of Data To efficiently analyze a firehose of data, scientists first have to break big numbers into bits. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Mar-15 • 16 minutes Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes Physicists theorize that a new "traversable" kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Mar-13 • 21 minutes Brainless Embryos Suggest Bioelectricity Guides Growth Researchers are building a case that long before the nervous system works, the brain sends crucial bioelectric signals to guide the growth of embryonic tissues. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by SYBS. |
| 2018-Mar-01 • 16 minutes New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning A new idea called the "information bottleneck" is helping to explain the puzzling success of today's artificial-intelligence algorithms - and might also explain how human brains learn. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Feb-16 • 19 minutes Clever Machines Learn How to Be Curious Computer scientists are finding ways to code curiosity into intelligent machines. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2018-Feb-01 • 14 minutes Mathematicians Tame Rogue Waves, Lighting Up Future of LEDs Mathematicians have figured out how to predict the behavior of electrons. It's a mathematical discovery that could have immediate practical effects. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Susan Valot with bells from Freesound.org, including itsallhappening. |
| 2018-Jan-18 • 18 minutes Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution Hybrids, once treated as biological misfits, have been the secret saviors of many animal species in trouble. Reconciling that truth with conservation policies poses a challenge for science. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Silent Partner. |
| 2017-Nov-17 • 21 minutes What Made the Moon? New Ideas Try to Rescue a Troubled Theory Textbooks will tell you the moon formed when a Mars-sized mass smashed into the Earth. But new research has scientists dreaming new ways our silvery sister could have formed. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by John Deley and the 41 Players. |
| 2017-Oct-12 • 16 minutes In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium John Nash's ideas about equilibrium are widespread in economic theory, but a new study shows they're not always realistic. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2017-Sep-21 • 11 minutes Pentagon Tiling Proof Solves Century-Old Math Problem A French mathematician has completed the classification of all convex pentagons. Now mathematicians know all the convex polygons that can tile a plane. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2017-Aug-31 • 16 minutes Can Microbes Encourage Altruism? Parasites skillfully manipulate their hosts, but could they be responsible for altruistic behaviors some animals show towards their own kind? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2017-Aug-25 • 15 minutes Dark Matter Recipe Calls for One Part Superfluid Dark matter seems to act differently at different scales. Two physicists propose one possible explanation may be that dark matter sometimes condenses into a superfluid. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2017-Jul-20 • 12 minutes A Puzzle of Clever Connections Nears a Happy End Three young friends became some of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century - but they never solved their own puzzle. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by John Deley and the 41 Players. |
| 2017-Jul-13 • 13 minutes The Thoughts of a Spiderweb Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn't fully confined within the head. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2017-Jun-29 • 17 minutes How to Quantify (and Fight) Gerrymandering Tools developed by mathematicians and quantitative social scientists can help combat partisan gerrymandering. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Audionautix. |
| 2017-Jun-01 • 15 minutes A Long-Sought Proof, Found and Almost Lost Thomas Royen, a retired German statistician, found a long-sought proof that links geometry, probability theory and statistics. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is Redwood Trail by Jason Shaw. |
| 2017-May-18 • 12 minutes A New Blast May Have Forged Cosmic Gold Did space-rippling collisions of neutron stars create the universe's supply of gold and other heavy metals? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music by Kevin MacLeod. |
| 2017-Apr-06 • 10 minutes Why Did Life Move to Land? For the View The ancient creatures who first crawled onto land may have been lured by the informational benefit that comes from seeing through air. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Mar-30 • 7 minutes New Number Systems Seek Their Lost Primes For centuries, mathematicians tried to solve problems by adding new values to the usual numbers. Now they're investigating the unintended consequences of that tinkering. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Mar-16 • 8 minutes Researchers Tap a Sleep Switch in the Brain Powerful new experiments have uncovered some of the molecular underpinnings of sleep. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Mar-09 • 10 minutes Experiment Reaffirms Quantum Weirdness Physicists are closing the door on an intriguing loophole around the quantum phenomenon Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Mar-02 • 6 minutes To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics The ancient Greeks argued that the best life was filled with beauty, truth, justice, play and love. The mathematician Francis Su knows just where to find them. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Feb-23 • 12 minutes Dividing Droplets Could Explain Life’s Origin Researchers have discovered that simple "chemically active" droplets grow to the size of cells and spontaneously divide, suggesting they might have evolved into the first living cells. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Feb-16 • 11 minutes Infant Brains Reveal How the Mind Gets Built Is the brain a blank slate, or is it wired from birth to understand the world? An ambitious new study put infants into an MRI machine to reveal a neural organization similar to that of adults. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Feb-09 • 12 minutes 3-D Fractals Offer Clues to Complex Systems By folding fractals into 3-D objects, a mathematical duo hopes to gain new insight into simple equations. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Feb-02 • 13 minutes Grand Unification Dream Kept at Bay Physicists have failed to find disintegrating protons, throwing into limbo the beloved theory that the forces of nature were unified at the beginning of time. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2017-Jan-26 • 24 minutes The Art of Teaching Math and Science The impasse in math and science instruction runs deeper than test scores or the latest educational theory. What can we learn from the best teachers on the front lines? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Dec-08 • 18 minutes The Case Against Dark Matter A proposed theory of gravity does away with dark matter, even as new astrophysical findings challenge the need for galaxies full of the invisible mystery particles. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Nov-24 • 13 minutes What Sonic Black Holes Say About Real Ones Can a fluid analogue of a black hole point physicists toward the theory of quantum gravity, or is it a red herring? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Nov-17 • 9 minutes Giant Genetic Map Shows Life’s Hidden Links In a monumental set of experiments, spread out over nearly two decades, biologists removed genes two at a time to uncover the secret workings of the cell. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Nov-10 • 10 minutes How to Cut Cake Fairly and Finally Eat It Too Computer scientists have come up with an algorithm that can fairly divide a cake among any number of people. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Oct-27 • 16 minutes Strange Dark Galaxy Puzzles Astrophysicists The surprising discovery of a massive, Milky Way-size galaxy that is made of 99.99 percent dark matter has astronomers dreaming up new ideas about how galaxies form. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Oct-20 • 16 minutes Hacker-Proof Code Confirmed Computer scientists can prove certain programs to be error-free with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems. The advances are being used to secure everything from unmanned drones to the internet. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Oct-13 • 13 minutes Colliding Black Holes Tell New Story of Stars Just months after their discovery, gravitational waves coming from the mergers of black holes are shaking up astrophysics. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Sep-22 • 14 minutes The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions Irrationality may be a consequence of the brain's ravenous energy needs. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Sep-15 • 13 minutes What No New Particles Means for Physics Physicists are confronting their "nightmare scenario." What does the absence of new particles suggest about how nature works? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Sep-08 • 21 minutes A Debate Over the Physics of Time According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass. Yet a number of physicists hope to replace this "block universe" with a physical theory of time. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Aug-18 • 16 minutes Biologists Search for New Model Organisms The bulk of biological research is centered on a handful of species. Are we missing a huge chunk of life's secrets? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Aug-11 • 12 minutes Neutrinos Hint of Matter-Antimatter Rift An early sign that neutrinos behave differently than antineutrinos suggests an answer to one of the biggest questions in physics. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Aug-05 • 14 minutes A Bird’s-Eye View of Nature’s Hidden Order Scientists are exploring a mysterious pattern, found in birds' eyes, boxes of marbles and other surprising places, that is neither regular nor random. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Jul-28 • 13 minutes How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space Richard Feynman's famous diagrams embody a deep shift in thinking about how the universe is put together. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Jul-21 • 14 minutes The Oracle of Arithmetic At 28, Peter Scholze is uncovering deep connections between number theory and geometry. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Jul-07 • 10 minutes New Life Found That Lives Off Electricity Scientists have figured out how microbes can suck energy from rocks. Such life-forms might be more widespread than anyone anticipated. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Jun-17 • 16 minutes Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians A new series of papers has settled a long-standing question related to the popular game in which players seek patterned sets of three cards. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Jun-09 • 10 minutes How Neanderthal DNA Helps Humanity Neanderthals and Denisovans may have supplied modern humans with genetic variants that let them thrive in new environments. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Jun-02 • 13 minutes New Support for Alternative Quantum View An experiment claims to have invalidated a decades-old criticism against pilot-wave theory, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics that avoids the most baffling features of the subatomic universe. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-May-26 • 13 minutes New Evidence for the Necessity of Loneliness A specific set of neurons deep in the brain may motivate us to seek company, holding social species together. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-May-12 • 11 minutes Tiny Tests Seek the Universe’s Big Mysteries The search for exotic new physical phenomena is being led by huge experiments like the Large Hadron Collider. But at the other end of the spectrum lie tabletop experiments - small-scale probes of hidden dimensions, dark matter and dark energy. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-May-05 • 12 minutes A Secret Flexibility Found in Life’s Blueprints A new study reveals that individual genes can create many different versions of the molecular machinery that powers the cell. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Apr-28 • 26 minutes Physicists Hunt for the Big Bang’s Triangles The story of the universe's birth - and evidence for string theory - could be found in triangles and myriad other shapes in the sky. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Apr-21 • 14 minutes Debate Intensifies Over Dark Disk Theory In the new, free-for-all era of dark matter research, the controversial idea that dark matter is concentrated in thin disks is being rescued from scientific oblivion. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Apr-14 • 25 minutes Mapping the Brain to Build Better Machines A race to decipher the brain's algorithms could revolutionize machine learning. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Apr-07 • 22 minutes Sphere Packing Solved in Higher Dimensions A Ukrainian mathematician has solved the centuries-old sphere-packing problem in dimensions eight and 24. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Mar-31 • 22 minutes The Beasts That Keep the Beat New insights from neuroscience - aided by a small zoo's worth of dancing animals - are revealing the biological origins of rhythm. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Mar-24 • 26 minutes Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a long-standing assumption about how they behave. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Mar-24 • 34 minutes A Life in Games John Horton Conway claims to have never worked a day in his life. This adaptation from the biography Genius at Play shows how serious advances such as the surreal numbers can spring out of fun and games. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Mar-10 • 22 minutes After Black Holes Collide, a Puzzling Flash A satellite spotted a burst of light just as gravitational waves rolled in from the collision of two black holes. Was the flash a cosmic coincidence, or do astrophysicists need to rethink what black holes can do? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Mar-03 • 24 minutes The Quantum Secret to Superconductivity In a virtuoso experiment, physicists have revealed details of a "quantum critical point" that underlies high-temperature superconductivity. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Feb-25 • 29 minutes How to Build Life in a Pre-Darwinian World Perhaps chemistry played a more instrumental role in the origin of life than scientists thought. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Feb-18 • 35 minutes Gravitational Waves Discovered at Long Last This week on the podcast, ripples in space-time have been detected a century after Einstein predicted them, launching a new era in astronomy. Then, in our second segment, researchers think they can avoid some knotty paradoxes at the edge of physics by replacing black holes with fuzzballs. |
| 2016-Feb-11 • 25 minutes Scientists Debate Signatures of Alien Life Searching for signs of life on faraway planets, astrobiologists must decide which telltale biosignature gases to target. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Feb-04 • 26 minutes New Clues to How the Brain Maps Time The same brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time. The research suggests that our thoughts may take place on a mental space-time canvas. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Jan-28 • 34 minutes Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links - not space-time - constitute the fundamental structure of the universe. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2016-Jan-21 String Theory Meets Loop Quantum Gravity Two leading candidates for a “theory of everything,” long thought to be incompatible, may be two sides of the same coin. The post String Theory Meets Loop Quantum Gravity first appeared on Quanta Magazine |
| 2016-Jan-14 • 30 minutes Landmark Algorithm Breaks 30-Year Impasse Computer scientists are abuzz over a fast new algorithm for solving one of the central problems in the field. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Dec-17 • 31 minutes Math Quartet Joins Forces on Unified Theory A new breakthrough that bridges number theory and geometry is just the latest triumph for a close-knit group of mathematicians. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Dec-10 • 30 minutes The Incredible Shrinking Sex Chromosome Nature offers species a panoply of ways to determine an organism's sex. That flexibility suggests we need not be concerned about losing sex chromosomes, but it raises the question of why such a fundamental property is so variable. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Nov-26 • 34 minutes Nature’s Critical Warning System Scientists are homing in on a warning signal that arises in complex systems like ecological food webs, the brain and the Earth's climate. Could it help prevent future catastrophes? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Nov-19 • 37 minutes How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains Scientists have begun to identify the symphony of biological triggers that powered the extraordinary expansion of the human brain. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Nov-12 • 30 minutes Mongrel Microbe Tests Story of Complex Life A newly discovered class of microbe could help to resolve one of the biggest and most controversial mysteries in evolution - how simple microbes transformed into the complex cells that produced animals, plants and fungi. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Nov-05 • 20 minutes Theorists Draw Closer to Perfect Coloring A theorem for coloring a large class of "perfect" mathematical networks could ease the way for a long-sought general coloring proof. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Oct-22 • 32 minutes A Twisted Path to Equation-Free Prediction Complex natural systems defy standard mathematical analysis, so one ecologist is throwing out the equations. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Oct-15 • 27 minutes The Mutant Genes Behind the Black Death Only a few genetic changes were enough to turn an ordinary stomach bug into the bacteria responsible for the plague. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Oct-08 • 27 minutes A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation A major advance in computational complexity reveals deep connections between the classes of problems that computers can - and can't - possibly do. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Oct-01 • 33 minutes Visions of Future Physics Nima Arkani-Hamed is championing a campaign to build the world's largest particle collider, even as he pursues a new vision of the laws of nature. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Sep-25 • 31 minutes How the Body’s Trillions of Clocks Keep Time Cellular clocks are almost everywhere. Clues to how they work are coming from the places that they're not. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Sep-16 • 24 minutes Einstein’s Parable of Quantum Insanity Einstein refused to believe in the inherent unpredictability of the world. Is the subatomic world insane, or just subtle? Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Sep-10 • 25 minutes A New Design for Cryptography’s Black Box A two-year-old cryptographic breakthrough has proven difficult to put into practice. But new advances show how near-perfect computer security might be surprisingly close at hand. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Sep-03 • 28 minutes How Mutant Viral Swarms Spread Disease Viruses exist as "mutant clouds" of closely-related individuals. A new understanding of these swarms is helping researchers predict how viruses will evolve and where disease is likely to spread. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Aug-27 • 34 minutes A Surprise Source of Life’s Code Emerging data suggests that mysterious new genes arise from so-called "junk" DNA. And, all life on Earth is made of molecules that twist in the same direction, but new research reveals that this may not always be the case. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Aug-20 • 34 minutes How Life and Luck Changed Earth’s Minerals Is geology predictable or due to chance events? And, a museum rock, traced back to its origins, reveals mysteries about the early solar system. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Aug-06 • 20 minutes At Tiny Scales, a Giant Burst on Tree of Life A new technique for identifying microbes is revealing a hidden world. And, can computers make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Jul-30 • 22 minutes The New Laws of Explosive Networks An unexpected answer in the effort to bridge the particle and fluid descriptions of nature. And, the hidden laws that reveal how explosive networks form. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |
| 2015-Jul-30 • 24 minutes New Letters Added to the Genetic Alphabet Scientists hope that new genetic letters, created in the lab, will endow DNA with new powers. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. |