In 2017, Roger Guimerà and Marta Sales-Pardo discovered a cause of cell division, the process driving the growth of living beings. But they couldn’t immediately reveal how they learned the answer. The researchers hadn’t spotted […]
Category: quantamagazine
For scientists studying de-extinction — the ambitious effort to resurrect extinct species — a paper that appeared in Current Biology in March was a sobering reality check. Thomas Gilbert, a genomics researcher and professor at […]
After a lengthy experiment with tantalizing implications for origin-of-life studies, a research group in Japan has reported creating a test tube world of molecules that spontaneously evolved both complexity and, surprisingly, cooperation. Over hundreds of […]
General relativity and quantum mechanics are the two most successful conceptual breakthroughs of modern physics, but Einstein’s description of gravity as a curvature in space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum […]
Math has a certain logic to it. If you use it to accurately describe a situation, sometimes you can predict the inevitable — for instance, the moment an eclipse will take place — centuries in […]
Scientific progress has been inseparable from better measurements. Before 1927, only human ingenuity seemed to limit how precisely we could measure things. Then Werner Heisenberg discovered that quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental limit on the […]
For nearly two centuries, all kinds of researchers interested in how fluids flow have turned to the Navier-Stokes equations. But mathematicians still harbor basic questions about them. Foremost among them: How well do the equations […]
On October 9, 2009, a two-ton rocket smashed into the moon traveling at 9,000 kilometers per hour. As it exploded in a shower of dust and heated the lunar surface to hundreds of degrees, the […]
When scientists think about the movement of microbes between animal species, we generally focus on “spillover” events: when pathogens move from animals to humans. But pathogen transmission isn’t a one-way street. Humans appear to have […]
Once, long ago, the only players in the grand drama of life, predation and death were invisibly small and simple cells. Archaea and bacteria jigged and whirled through seas and ponds, assembled themselves into fortresses […]
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