Every experience we have changes our brain, the way a ceramicist reshapes a slab of clay. Every corner we turn, every conversation we have, every shudder we feel causes cascading effects: Chemicals are released, electricity […]
Category: quantamagazine
From the tangle in your computer cord to the mess your cat made of your knitting basket, knots are everywhere in daily life. They also pervade science, showing up in loops of DNA, intertwined polymer […]
You’re the earliest known life form. There’s no food around right now. It would be great to go somewhere else. But you’re stuck. Really stuck. At your size (a couple of microns), water feels like […]
For the past few decades, researchers have understood that quantum computers should eventually be able to crack the widely used codes that secure much of the digital world. To protect against this fate, they’ve spent […]
Evolutionary arms races — where one species is pitted against another, driving the evolution of new or more sophisticated weapons as each tries to gain the upper hand — are ubiquitous in nature. One of […]
The tipping point came in the summer of 2025. That July, several artificial intelligence models solved five out of six problems at the International Mathematical Olympiad, an annual challenge for some of the world’s best […]
In fall 2024, the best-selling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari went on the talk show Morning Joe. “Let me tell you one small story,” he said. “When OpenAI developed GPT-4, they wanted to test […]
Neutrinos have about as little influence as a particle can have. They have essentially no heft, no electric charge, and no “color” charge. As a result, the neutrino has no connection with most of nature’s […]
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. One Tuesday in June 2025, a white Chevy Suburban set off down the northernmost highway in North America. The sun of Alaska’s polar summer hadn’t set in […]
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world. Shor worked […]
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