When you walk into a room full of people, you can speculate about all sorts of things, from political leanings to TV viewing habits. But if the room has at least six people, you can […]
Category: quantamagazine
The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency […]
They are invisible at first. In their Southeast Asian forest homes, they grow as thin strands of cells, foreign fibers sometimes more than 10 meters long that weave through the vital tissues of their vine […]
We solved our last Insights puzzle by performing some arithmetic on a simple version of a complex problem in order to discover its patterns. Often this approach can reveal hidden insights. You can also use […]
In high school physics, we learn about Newton’s second law of motion — force equals mass times acceleration — through simple examples of a single force (say, gravity) acting on an object of some mass. […]
During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding […]
Earth is unique in plenty of ways. But Lucía Pérez-Díaz, a geologist at the University of Oxford, reckons that one of its most stunning novelties is its ability to constantly change its face. Our planet’s […]
If you ask an astronomer to choose the single most exciting picture in all of astronomy, many of us will point to a familiar orange ring. At a glance it may not look like much […]
On February 22, a postdoctoral mathematician named Giles Gardam gave an hourlong online talk about the unit conjecture, a basic but confounding algebra question that had stood open for more than 80 years. He carefully […]
In 2008, while the medical resident Sam Behjati was doing his usual rounds in a hospital maternity ward, a colleague urgently pulled him into a patient’s room, where he saw a mother beaming with joy […]
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