Mathematicians like to generalize concepts into higher dimensions. Sometimes this is easy. If you want to efficiently pack squares in two dimensions, you arrange them like a checkerboard. To squeeze together three-dimensional cubes, you stack […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Our sun is the best-observed star in the entire universe. We see its light every day. For centuries, scientists have tracked the dark spots dappling its radiant face, while in recent decades, telescopes in space […]
Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding within large language models (LLMs) — and she might sound as if she’s poking fun at it. The phrase “hand-wavy” is […]
Milk is more than just a food for babies. Breast milk has evolved to deliver thousands of diverse molecules including growth factors, hormones and antibodies, as well as microbes. Elizabeth Johnson, a molecular nutritionist at […]
Anne Salomon’s first week as a graduate student in 2001 was not what she had anticipated. While other new students headed to introductory lectures, Salomon was whisked away by van and then motorboat to Tatoosh […]
String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a patch of space, the theory says, and you won’t see a menagerie […]
The central objects of study in topology are spaces called manifolds, which look flat when you zoom in on them. The surface of a sphere, for instance, is a two-dimensional manifold. Topologists understand such two-dimensional […]
In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described […]
What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it around and […]
At a conference in Japan a few years ago, David Dunsky attended a talk about gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time created when massive objects like stars and black holes accelerate. Dunsky was […]
Recent Comments