To harbor life, at least as we know it, a planet must orbit a star that is relatively calm and stable. The planet’s orbit must also be nearly circular so the planet experiences similar warmth […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the Latin for “little brain,” which […]
Artificial intelligence seems more powerful than ever, with chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT capable of producing uncannily humanlike text. But for all their talents, these bots still leave researchers wondering: Do such models actually understand […]
In the early 2000s, it seemed that cosmologists had solved the largest and most complex puzzle of all: how the universe works. “There was this amazing moment when all of a sudden, all the pieces […]
In 1969, the British mathematician John Conway devised a beguilingly simple set of rules for creating complex behavior. His Game of Life, often referred to simply as Life, unfolds on an infinite square grid of […]
Bacteria don’t throw dinner parties or tell jokes, but they are social in their own way. When the presence of food gives them an opportunity to grow, reproduce and evolve, they will rapidly, even eagerly, […]
Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And […]
Sarah Hart has always had an eye for the covert ways mathematics permeates other fields. As a child, she was struck by the ubiquity of the number 3 in her fairy tales. Hart’s mother, a […]
All the magnets you have ever interacted with, such as the tchotchkes stuck to your refrigerator door, are magnetic for the same reason. But what if there were another, stranger way to make a material […]
If you’ve ever sent a text message, played a CD, or stored a file in the cloud, you’ve benefited from error correction. This revolutionary idea dates back to the 1940s, when researchers first realized that […]
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