Imagine that you’re sent to a pristine rainforest to carry out a wildlife census. Every time you see an animal, you snap a photo. Your digital camera will track the total number of shots, but […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In an old Indian parable, six blind men each touch a different part of an elephant. They disagree about what the elephant must look like: Is it smooth or rough? Is it like a snake […]
Out of all the cells in the body, oocytes are the most patient. The immature egg cells form inside a female’s body when she’s still a fetus in her mother’s womb, and then they wait […]
Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. “What’s the capital of Peru?” would get one answer, and “Is Lima the capital of Peru?” […]
If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would consider normal, they would be world-changing. They could dramatically amplify power grids, levitate high-speed […]
Proteins are the molecular machines that sustain every cell and organism, and knowing what they look like will be critical to untangling how they function normally and malfunction in disease. Now researchers have taken a […]
The end is brutal for electrons hurtling at 99.9999999% of the speed of light through SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s two-mile-long beam pipe: a final slam into End Station A. In the late 1960s and early […]
In 1940, from a jailhouse in Rouen, France, André Weil wrote one of the most consequential letters of 20th-century mathematics. He was serving time for refusing to join the French army, and he filled his […]
Every organism visible to the naked eye is a mass of genetically identical cells. Each of these multicellular creatures started as a single cell that divided countless times to produce its body. And while each […]
Physicists have done a remarkable job explaining the chaos of the universe with well-behaved equations, but certain situations remain mysterious. Among these are collections of many tiny particles — they can be atoms, electrons, anything […]
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