All the magnets you have ever interacted with, such as the tchotchkes stuck to your refrigerator door, are magnetic for the same reason. But what if there were another, stranger way to make a material […]
Category: quantamagazine
If you’ve ever sent a text message, played a CD, or stored a file in the cloud, you’ve benefited from error correction. This revolutionary idea dates back to the 1940s, when researchers first realized that […]
Aging can seem like an unregulated process: As time marches along, our cells and bodies inevitably accumulate dings and dents that cause dysfunctions, failures and ultimately death. However, in 1993 a discovery upended that interpretation […]
Over the last two years, mathematicians have identified the best versions of a child’s playroom’s worth of shapes. These results occupy a quirky corner of math and, fittingly, have been produced by unlikely collaborations, involving […]
Near midnight on March 26, 1961, dark waters lapped at the hull of a converted naval barge as it queasily rocked in the Pacific Ocean. The ship had just arrived at this spot, some 240 […]
Lenore Blum’s long career has spanned the breadth of mathematics and computer science. She’s done influential work in logic and cryptography, and she formulated an entirely new model of computation. And though she didn’t set […]
James Stroud had a problem. The evolutionary biologist had spent several years studying lizards on a small island in Miami. These Anolis lizards had looked the same for millennia; they had apparently evolved very little […]
Earth’s fate rests on a coin flip. In 5 billion years, our sun will balloon into a red giant star. Whether Earth survives is an “open question,” said Melinda Soares-Furtado, an astrophysicist at the University […]
On a summer night in the Bay of Naples, hordes of worms swam upward from the seagrass toward the water’s surface under the light of a waning moon. Not long before, the creatures began a […]
In 2008, the mathematician Oded Schramm died in a hiking accident in the Cascade mountains some 50 miles east of Seattle. Though he was just 46 years old, he had constructed entirely new areas of […]
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