A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in […]
Category: quantamagazine
In a laboratory 2 kilometers underground, a crane lowers Matt Depatie, a detector technologist, through a hatch into a white-walled cavern filled with about 7,000 tons of ultrapure water that glows as blue as wiper […]
Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, but they are far from it. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, nor why a loved one’s touch soothes […]
At first glance, corals present as little more than colorful rocks — piles of lobes, stalagmites, and branches poking out from the seafloor. They are anything but. Corals are complex creatures that form enduring colonies, […]
On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model — one not available to the public — had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” […]
I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI “reasoning”? Sorry for the air quotes. That punctuational side-eye was more common in 2024, when the specially trained cousins of LLMs now known […]
For 25 years, physicists have been puzzled by an apparent one-part-in-a-million problem. Their expectations of the way that certain particles should wobble in a magnetic field were clashing with what they saw in experiments. The […]
Within every cow is a thriving ecosystem. Churning deep in its intestines, a massive fermentation chamber known as the rumen hosts a robust microbiome that can consume up to 100 pounds of feed daily. Inside […]
One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding, but in the 1990s, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating rather […]
Every four years, the math world’s preeminent awards are given to the finest minds of a generation. The young winners — all under 40 on the first day of the year — have reshaped mathematics […]
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