If you’ve interacted with another human being this year, you’ve probably heard of Wordle, the addictive word-guessing game the coder Josh Wardle created for his partner and then sold to The New York Times for […]
Category: quantamagazine
The idea that life’s deepest, oldest roots were laid down by RNA molecules that evolved ever more complexity has dominated the origins-of-life field for the past few decades, reigning over competing theories that started instead […]
If a million computer scientists had dinner together, they’d rack up an enormous bill. And if one of them was feeling particularly thrifty and wanted to check if the bill was correct, the process would […]
The human body contains more than 200 types of cells by most estimates, all descended from a single fertilized egg. The spindly cells of the skin, the gangly branching neurons, the plump fat cells, the […]
With the December 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most expensive and ambitious scientific initiatives ever attempted commenced operations. Now that the telescope has been successfully deployed in its unique […]
Back in 1981, Cameron Gordon introduced a new way to relate two knots — mathematical constructs modeled after the knots that appear in a single thread or string. In his paper, he conjectured that this […]
Leslie Lamport may not be a household name, but he’s behind a few of them for computer scientists: the typesetting program LaTeX and the work that made cloud infrastructure at Google and Amazon possible. He’s […]
The quantum physicists Sandu Popescu, Yakir Aharonov and Daniel Rohrlich have been troubled by the same scenario for three decades. It started when they wrote about a surprising wave phenomenon called superoscillation in 1990. “We […]
Today, more than three years after the release of the first-ever image of a black hole, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) shared an image of Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) — the supermassive specimen […]
Last summer, three researchers took a small step toward answering one of the most important questions in theoretical computer science. To paraphrase Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study, that question asks something simple […]
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