Billions of years ago, some unknown location on the sterile, primordial Earth became a cauldron of complex organic molecules from which the first cells emerged. Origin-of-life researchers have proposed countless imaginative ideas about how that […]
Category: quantamagazine
Last March, Iowa State University mathematicians Leslie Hogben and Carolyn Reinhart received a welcome surprise. Adam Wagner, a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, emailed to let them know he’d answered a question they’d published […]
Imagine that while you are enjoying your morning bowl of Cheerios, a spider drops from the ceiling and plops into the milk. Years later, you still can’t get near a bowl of cereal without feeling […]
In 1885, King Oscar II of Sweden announced a public challenge consisting of four mathematical problems. The French polymath Henri Poincaré focused on one related to the motion of celestial bodies, the so-called n-body problem. […]
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview […]
In 2018, astronomers operating an antenna called EDGES in the Australian outback reported that radio waves of a particular frequency were significantly dimmer than other waves coming from the night sky. The finding, published in […]
In Ian Fleming’s first novel, James Bond returns from the Royale-les-Eaux casino to his hotel room and inspects it for signs of intrusion. First, he confirms that a hair carefully placed inside his writing desk […]
From the bizarre creatures in the depths of the oceans to the bacteria inside our bodies, all life on Earth consists of cells. But we have only a very rough idea of how even the […]
During a solar eclipse in 1919, Arthur Eddington observed light bending around the sun just as predicted by general relativity, Albert Einstein’s new theory of gravity. Since then, general relativity, which says that massive objects […]
In most two-player games, it is generally better to win the toss and go first. And if you are sharing a pizza with someone and want to have a larger portion, it’s usually better to […]
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