It’s the year 2718. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft to hyperjump to distant solar systems and back to Earth. The drive promises to revolutionize space exploration. But there’s a catch. […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Play Quanta Magazine’s daily interactive math game, Hyperjumps! The post Hyperjumps Math Game first appeared on Quanta Magazine Click to rate this post! [Total: 0 Average: 0]You have already voted for this article
In Disney’s 1959 film Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck, inspired by the narrator’s descriptions of the geometry of billiards, energetically strikes the cue ball, sending it ricocheting around the table before it finally hits […]
We often talk about evolution in terms of competition, as the survival of the fittest. But if it is, then where did the widespread (and widely admired) impulse to help others even at great cost […]
The discovery during the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s that we humans have only about 20,000 protein-coding genes — about as many as the tiny soil-dwelling nematode worm, and less than half as […]
Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots […]
Unlike many astronomers, Erin Kara didn’t grow up star-struck. “I don’t have that story of being that little kid staring up at the stars and wanting to do this, which gave me some anxiety,” she […]
About 70 years ago, an engineer at IBM named Hans Peter Luhn quietly changed the course of computer science. Luhn already held several patents, including one for a device that could measure a cloth’s thread […]
Imagine that a grid of hexagons, honeycomb-like, stretches before you. Some hexagons are empty; others are filled by a 6-foot tall column of solid concrete. The result is a maze of sorts. For over half […]
By making maps of the magnetic fields hidden inside massive galaxy clusters, astronomers are getting closer to finding the origin of cosmic magnetism. “These are the first maps of the detailed structure of magnetic fields […]
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