Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals […]
Category: quantamagazine
Have you ever admired how the slats of a hardwood floor fit together so cleanly, or how the hexagons underneath your bathroom rug perfectly meet up? These are examples of geometric tilings, arrangements of shapes […]
How do brains learn? It’s a mystery, one that applies both to the spongy organs in our skulls and to their digital counterparts in our machines. Even though artificial neural networks (ANNs) are built from […]
On June 27, 2010, the FBI arrested 10 Russian spies who lived and worked as American professionals near New York City. The case, which unraveled an intricate system of false identities and clandestine meetings, exposed […]
By definition, the universe seems like it should be the totality of everything that exists. Yet a variety of arguments emerging from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics hint that there could also be unobservable […]
Memories are shadows of the past but also flashlights for the future. Our recollections guide us through the world, tune our attention and shape what we learn later in life. Human and animal studies have […]
In 2009, a pair of astronomers at the Paris Observatory announced a startling discovery. After building a detailed computational model of our solar system, they ran thousands of numerical simulations, projecting the motions of the […]
During fleeting fits, the sun occasionally hurls a colossal amount of energy into space. Called solar flares, these eruptions last for mere minutes, and they can trigger catastrophic blackouts and dazzling auroras on Earth. But […]
Nora Kassner suspected her computer wasn’t as smart as people thought. In October 2018, Google released a language model algorithm called BERT, which Kassner, a researcher in the same field, quickly loaded on her laptop. […]
Minhyong Kim rejects being called an optimist, but he sounds an awful lot like one. “If we take reality exactly as it is, I don’t think we have any real grounds for pessimism,” he said […]
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