We know next to nothing about the other 6 billion or so Earth-like planets in the galaxy. With the imminent launch of the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built, Laura Kreidberg is optimistic this […]
Category: quantamagazine
In the machine learning world, the sizes of artificial neural networks — and their outsize successes — are creating conceptual conundrums. When a network named AlexNet won an annual image recognition competition in 2012, it […]
Drop an ice cube into a glass of water. You can probably picture the way it starts to melt. You also know that no matter what shape it takes, you’ll never see it melt into […]
Chemists are constantly tasked not just with designing useful new molecules — ones for novel drugs, energy-storing materials and countless other jobs — but with designing better ways to make those molecules. One big hurdle […]
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three scientists who have pushed forward our understanding of complex and chaotic systems, including Earth’s climate. Syukuro Manabe, a physicist at Princeton University, and Klaus Hasselmann, […]
We often appreciate the world around us in terms of its glorious sights, stirring sounds and evocative smells, all of which mark important stimuli and changes in our environment. But senses that are no less […]
Anil Seth wants to understand how minds work. As a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England, Seth has seen firsthand how neurons do what they do — but he knows that the puzzle […]
In 2018, researchers at the forefront of an entirely new approach to building quantum computers published, in the journal Nature, what looked to be a landmark achievement. Existing quantum computers are notoriously fragile, their quantum […]
Sorting a collection of shapes is child’s play. Circles here, squares there, triangles in their own pile. But if you take the task seriously, there’s a lot more to it. In fact, one of the […]
This spring, at a meeting of Syracuse University’s quark physics group, Ivan Polyakov announced that he had uncovered the fingerprints of a semi-mythical particle. “We said, ‘This is impossible. What mistake are you making?’” recalled […]
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