Last summer, three researchers took a small step toward answering one of the most important questions in theoretical computer science. To paraphrase Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study, that question asks something simple […]
Category: quantamagazine
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 […]
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 […]
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