We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you would be hard-pressed to […]
Category: quantamagazine
If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on a rainy afternoon, you’ve probably watched raindrops racing each other down the car window. When pairs of droplets collide, they merge into a new droplet, losing their […]
We all know to be careful about the details we share online, but the information we seek can also be revealing. Search for driving directions, and our location becomes far easier to guess. Check for […]
For most of humankind’s existence, Earth was the only known ocean-draped world, seemingly unlike any other cosmic isle. But in 1979, NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Its moon Europa, a frozen realm, was […]
There are three kinds of prime numbers. The first is a solitary outlier: 2, the only even prime. After that, half the primes leave a remainder of 1 when divided by 4. The other half […]
A fruit bat hanging in the corner of a cave stirs; it is ready to move. It scans the space to look for a free perch and then takes flight, adjusting its membranous wings to […]
Every day we see examples of repeating motifs. This symmetry and regularity can seem mundane and almost invisible, as with brickwork on building walls or the hexagonal pattern in a honeycomb. Or if we’re lucky […]
More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes came up with a method for finding prime numbers that continues to reverberate through mathematics today. His idea was to identify all the primes up to […]
Luca Giomi still remembers the time when, as a young graduate student, he watched two videos of droplets streaming from an inkjet printer. The videos were practically identical — except one wasn’t a video at […]
When Alexei Efros moved with his family from Russia to California as a teenager in the 1980s, he brought his Soviet-built personal computer, an Elektronika BK-0010. The machine had no external storage and overheated every […]
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