When you slip a slide under a microscope, a system of glass lenses magnifies the object of your attention — a microbe, for example. But even with the largest zoom on a classic compound optical […]
Category: quantamagazine
In early 2007, René Hudec was in Building D of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, thumbing through roomfuls of floor-to-ceiling cabinets that look more like a vast record collection than an academic archive. Each paper […]
The human brain is a vast network of billions of neurons. By exchanging signals to depress or excite each other, they generate patterns that ripple across the brain up to 1,000 times per second. For […]
Two centuries ago, Joseph Fourier gave mathematicians a magical technique. He conjectured that it’s possible to write almost any function as a sum of simple waves, a trick now called the Fourier transform. These days, […]
In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs bosons imbues other elementary particles […]
Nearly three years ago, a particle from space slammed into the Mediterranean Sea and lit up the partially complete Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (KM3NET) detector off the coast of Sicily. The particle was a neutrino, […]
On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, six closely watched bats took to the star-draped skies. As they flew across the seven-acre speck of land, devices implanted in their brains pinged data back to […]
Imagine if our skies were always filled with a thick layer of opaque clouds. With no way to see the stars, or to view our planet from above, would we have ever discovered that the […]
Just as there’s no single best way to organize your bookshelf, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to storing information. Consider the simple situation where you create a new digital file. Your computer needs to rapidly find […]
In 1998, astronomers discovered dark energy. The finding, which transformed our conception of the cosmos, came with a little-known consequence: It threw a wrench into the already daunting task of finding a version of string […]
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