For Valeria Saggio to boot up the computer in her former Vienna lab, she needed a special crystal, only as big as her fingernail. Saggio would place it gently into a small copper box, a […]
Category: quantamagazine
In a striking proof posted in September, three mathematicians have solved a 30-year-old problem called the André-Oort conjecture and advanced the centuries-long quest to understand the solutions of polynomial equations. The work draws on ideas […]
Chromosomes, the bundles of DNA that star in the mitotic ballet of cell division, play a leading role in complex life. But the question of how chromosomes came to exist and evolve has long been […]
Do you think there’s a triangle whose angles measure 41, 76 and 63 degrees? At first, answering this may seem easy. From geometry class we know that the sum of the measures of the interior […]
Our sun is getting brighter. If you could travel back in time to the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, you’d find a star that was about 30% dimmer than it is […]
Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve […]
Artificial intelligence is largely a numbers game. When deep neural networks, a form of AI that learns to discern patterns in data, began surpassing traditional algorithms 10 years ago, it was because we finally had […]
For sheer brilliance, it was hard to beat John von Neumann. An architect of the modern computer and inventor of game theory, von Neumann was legendary, above all, for his lightning-fast mental calculations. The story […]
Recently, three physicists calculated a number pertaining to the quantum nature of gravity. When they saw the value, “we couldn’t believe it,” said Pedro Vieira, one of the three. Gravity’s quantum-scale details are not something […]
A group of scientists may have stumbled upon a radical new way to do cosmology. Cosmologists usually determine the composition of the universe by observing as much of it as possible. But these researchers have […]
Recent Comments