We’re used to thinking of the brain as an electric organ. The rest of the body? Not so much. But it would be a mistake to dismiss your other tissues as dumb hunks of electrically […]
Category: quantamagazine
Nearly 200 years ago, the physicists Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes put the finishing touches on a set of equations that describe how fluids swirl. And for nearly 200 years, the Navier-Stokes equations have […]
Read a story about dogs, and you may remember it the next time you see one bounding through a park. That’s only possible because you have a unified concept of “dog” that isn’t tied to […]
Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly empty it. You remove all its visible contents, pump out any gases, and — applying some science-fiction technology — evacuate any unseeable material such as dark […]
The standard sperm-meets-egg story posits that sperm cells are hardly more than bundles of shrink-wrapped DNA with tails. Their mission is simple: Deliver a father’s genes into a mother’s egg for sexual reproduction. Just about […]
Mathematics is, at its core, an art. Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create and explore new worlds. They test, and then push past, the limits of their imagination. They engage with thousands of years […]
In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in algebraic geometry — using entirely alien techniques. It instantly captivated the field, stoking excitement in some mathematicians and skepticism […]
Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help with that.” But users have long played a cat-and-mouse game to try to trick language models into providing forbidden […]
The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this […]
Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can be hard to fully accept that fluent writing can come from an unthinking machine. That’s because, to many of […]
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