When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at […]
Category: quantamagazine
For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life. The lab-made synthetic cell grew, replicated its DNA, […]
The cells of animals, plants, and fungi start their lives by being torn apart. Cells are born by division, and just before a parent cell becomes two daughters, it doubles its nuclear DNA and carefully […]
In 1947, Paul Erdős, the itinerant Hungarian mathematician, introduced what would become one of math’s most powerful tools. He wanted to prove that a certain kind of object existed — in this case, a network […]
What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum particle scattering? The surprising answer lies in a corner of the algebraic combinatorics world that goes by the name of positive Grassmannian. In […]
Seventy years ago, the physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines took a custom-built 10-ton detector, surrounded it with thick lead walls and wet sandbags, and placed it near a powerful nuclear reactor at the Savannah […]
For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. According to current estimates, approximately 70% of the stuff that makes up the cosmos consists of dark energy, […]
Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells […]
In 1992, mathematicians famously proved that seven “riffle shuffles” — the kind where a player splits a deck of cards into two piles, then uses their thumbs to interleave them back together in a zipperlike […]
Every time I write about particle physics, I encounter a moment of uncertainty about a quantity that, at first glance, ought to be clear. How many kinds of elementary particles should I say there are? […]
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