Say you want to send a private message, cast a secret vote or sign a document securely. If you do any of these tasks on a computer, you’re relying on encryption to keep your data […]
Tag: quantamagazine
About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a […]
In the 127 years since the electron was discovered, it has undergone more scrutiny than perhaps any other particle. As a result, its properties are not just well known, but rote, textbook material: Electrons have […]
A visit to a peat bog will make you rethink everything you know about the surface of our planet. A bog is land, sort of, but not in the solid-ground sense you’re used to. If […]
In 1943, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg distracted himself from World War II by pondering a crisis in quantum theory. Predictions about how particles should behave were occasionally giving nonsensical, infinite results. These infinities led […]
For decades, the best drug therapies for treating depression, like SSRIs, have been based on the idea that depressed brains don’t have enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Yet for almost as long, it’s been clear […]
Reading a math paper is a bit like having dinner at a nice restaurant. The entrée might taste delicious, but it doesn’t tell the full story of how it was made. Clever recipes that end […]
György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies and used a radio transmitter […]
Moore’s law is already pretty fast. It holds that computer chips pack in twice as many transistors every two years or so, producing major jumps in speed and efficiency. But the computing demands of the […]
Atomic physicists “are jacks of all trades,” according to Alex Sushkov. “You have to have the idea, design the experiment, build the experiment, run the experiment, fix everything, take data, analyze data, write up the […]
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