On May 12, at nine simultaneous press conferences around the world, astrophysicists revealed the first image of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. At first, awesome though it was, the painstakingly […]
Category: quantamagazine
Along the murky bottom of the Amazon River, serpentine fish called electric eels scour the gloom for unwary frogs or other small prey. When one swims by, the fish unleash two 600-volt pulses of electricity […]
Some puzzle solutions are so beautiful and so vastly superior to the commonsense approach that they can seem like a miracle. The solution to the third question in our most recent Insights puzzle, for example, […]
This time a year ago, Steve Horvath was looking for pangolin DNA. The ancient scaly anteater would be a first for his collection, which was then about 200 mammals strong. “I didn’t have any of […]
Molybdenite, even to the trained eye, looks almost identical to graphite — a lustrous, silvery crystal. It acts similarly too, sloughing off flakes in a way that would make for a good pencil filling. But […]
In the early 1950s, a group of researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study embarked on a high-tech project. At the behest of John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine, the physicist Hedvig Selberg programmed the […]
For a decade now, many of the most impressive artificial intelligence systems have been taught using a huge inventory of labeled data. An image might be labeled “tabby cat” or “tiger cat,” for example, to […]
Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, predicting experimental results with stunning accuracy and advancing the study of higher dimensional mathematics. Yet, there’s also reason to believe that it […]
In the third century BCE, Archimedes posed a riddle about herding cattle that, he claimed, only a truly wise person could solve. His problem ultimately boiled down to an equation that involves the difference between […]
Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do […]
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