Life is an anthology of destruction. Everything you build eventually breaks. Everyone you love will die. Any sense of order or stability inevitably crumbles. The entire universe follows a dismal trek toward a dull state […]
Category: quantamagazine
A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1 — […]
How do you construct a perfect machine out of imperfect parts? That’s the central challenge for researchers building quantum computers. The trouble is that their elementary building blocks, called qubits, are exceedingly sensitive to disturbance […]
This year, superconductivity — the flow of electric current with zero resistance — was discovered in three distinct materials. Two instances stretch the textbook understanding of the phenomenon. The third shreds it completely. “It’s an […]
Death might seem like a pure loss, the disappearance of what makes a living thing distinct from everything else on our planet. But zoom in closer, to the cellular level, and it takes on a […]
Before he became a decorated pioneer of artificial intelligence, Raj Reddy grew up far from a computer lab. As a child in the 1940s, he lived in rural Katur, Andhra Pradesh, India. His one-room schoolhouse […]
Bacteria are in, around and all over us. They thrive in almost every corner of the planet, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to high up in the clouds, to the crevices of your ears, mouth, nose […]
In the fall of 2021, Malors Espinosa set out to devise a special type of math problem. As with any good research question, it would have to be thought-provoking, its solution nontrivial — something others […]
No device is an island: Your daily computational needs depend on more than just the microprocessors inside your computer or phone. Our modern world relies on “distributed computing,” which shares the computational load among multiple […]
Imagine standing on a railway platform watching a trolley go past. A girl on the trolley drops a bright red ball. To her, the ball falls straight down. But from the platform, you see the […]
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