Solar eclipses were interpreted throughout much of history as bad news for the sovereign — an ominous sign for their personal health or that of the realm. But those fears helped fuel thousands of years […]
Category: quantamagazine
Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential to shake the […]
In the summer of 1991, the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese was studying how movement is represented in the brain when he noticed something odd. He and his research adviser, Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the University of Parma […]
The change of plans came on a road trip. On a beautiful day last April, the mathematicians Rachel Greenfeld and Sarah Peluse set out from their home institution, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, […]
The renowned Polish piano duo Marek and Wacek didn’t use sheet music when playing live concerts. And yet onstage the pair appeared perfectly in sync. On adjacent pianos, they playfully picked up various musical themes, […]
Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. Within assemblies of organisms that seem as though they could get chaotic, order somehow emerges. The collective behaviors of animals differ in their details from one species to another, […]
Imagine you’re on a quest to understand the very nature of computation. You’re deep in the wilderness, far from any paths, and inscrutable messages are carved into the trunks of trees all around you — […]
In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10% of Georgia’s polling sites had closed over the […]
At the end of last year, the tech giant IBM announced what might sound like a milestone in quantum computing: the first-ever chip, called the Condor, with more than 1,000 quantum bits, or qubits. Given […]
Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place? This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a […]
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