The heart’s electrical system keeps all its muscle cells beating in sync. A hard whack to the chest at the wrong moment, however, can set up unruly waves of abnormal electrical excitation that are potentially […]
Category: quantamagazine
In 2017, a team of scientists from Germany trekked to Chile to investigate how living organisms sculpt the face of the Earth. A local ranger guided them through Pan de Azúcar, a roughly 150-square-mile national […]
In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate it so […]
Most physicists expect that when we zoom in on the fabric of reality, the unintuitive weirdness of quantum mechanics persists down to the very smallest scales. But in those settings, quantum mechanics collides with classical […]
So far this year, Quanta has chronicled three major advances in Ramsey theory, the study of how to avoid creating mathematical patterns. The first result put a new cap on how big a set of […]
Many complicated advances in research mathematics are spurred by a desire to understand some of the simplest questions about numbers. How are prime numbers distributed in the integers? Are there perfect cubes (like 8 = […]
A dense rainforest or other verdant terrestrial vegetation may be what first comes to mind at the mention of photosynthesis. Yet the clouds of phytoplankton that fill the oceans are the major drivers of that […]
Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles — those moving much faster than the rest — traveled […]
Astronomers have found an extra-low hum rumbling through the universe. The discovery, announced today, shows that extra-large ripples in space-time are constantly squashing and changing the shape of space. These gravitational waves are cousins to […]
The jellyfish that move through the seas by gently pulsing their saclike bodies may not seem to hold many secrets that would interest human engineers. But simple as the creatures are, jellyfish are masterful at […]
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