In 1994, Peter Shor, a mathematician then at Bell Labs in New Jersey, proved that a quantum computer would have the power to solve some problems exponentially faster than a classical machine. The question was: […]
Category: quantamagazine
How our brain, a three-pound mass of tissue encased within a bony skull, creates perceptions from sensations is a long-standing mystery. Abundant evidence and decades of sustained research suggest that the brain cannot simply be […]
Newton’s third law tells us that for every action, there’s an equal reaction going the opposite way. It’s been reassuring us for 400 years, explaining why we don’t fall through the floor (the floor pushes […]
For over 20 years, physicists have had reason to feel envious of certain fictional fish: specifically, the fish inhabiting the fantastic space of M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit III woodcut, which shrink to points as they […]
When you deposit a quarter and turn the crank on a gumball machine, the flavor you receive is basically random. In math, sometimes a polynomial, like x2 + y2, works the same way. When you […]
Dogs that habitually hear a bell at chow time become classically conditioned to drool at the mere chime, as the physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed in the 1890s: Their brains learn to associate the bell with […]
When the first sponge genomes were sequenced in the early 2000s, researchers were surprised to find that sponges not only have roughly as many genes as humans and other complex creatures but also have many […]
Bob O’Dell wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. It was 1992, and he had just got his hands on new images from the Hubble Space Telescope that zoomed in on young stars in […]
You can’t judge a book by its cover, or so we’re taught about people. For cells, however, that’s surprisingly less true. Using machine learning methods similar to those that enable computers to recognize faces, biologists […]
Our lives are a succession of optimization problems. They occur when we search for the fastest route home from work or attempt to balance cost and quality on a trip to the store, or even […]
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