Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has been fascinated by the variety of the natural world since he was a boy growing up in Philadelphia. The nature walks he took under the tutelage of his third grade teacher, Mr. […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In October, a Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The $5 billion mission is designed to find out if Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, can […]
For all their brilliance, artificial neural networks remain as inscrutable as ever. As these networks get bigger, their abilities explode, but deciphering their inner workings has always been near impossible. Researchers are constantly looking for […]
Dear Readers, Last July, I read this memo to the staff and explained why I had made the difficult decision to move on from my role as Quanta’s editor-in-chief. This magazine has meant everything to […]
Ever since viruses came to light in the late 1800s, scientists have set them apart from the rest of life. Viruses were far smaller than cells, and inside their protein shells they carried little more […]
Nothing escapes a black hole … or does it? In the 1970s, the physicist Stephen Hawking described a subtle process by which black holes can “evaporate,” with some particles evading gravitational oblivion. That phenomenon, now […]
For more than 40 years, Avi Wigderson has studied problems. But as a computational complexity theorist, he doesn’t necessarily care about the answers to these problems. He often just wants to know if they’re solvable […]
Scatter three points in a plane, then measure the distances between every pair of them. In all likelihood, you’ll find three different distances. But if you arrange the points in an equilateral triangle, then every […]
Solar eclipses were interpreted throughout much of history as bad news for the sovereign — an ominous sign for their personal health or that of the realm. But those fears helped fuel thousands of years […]
Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential to shake the […]
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