This year, superconductivity — the flow of electric current with zero resistance — was discovered in three distinct materials. Two instances stretch the textbook understanding of the phenomenon. The third shreds it completely. “It’s an […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Death might seem like a pure loss, the disappearance of what makes a living thing distinct from everything else on our planet. But zoom in closer, to the cellular level, and it takes on a […]
Before he became a decorated pioneer of artificial intelligence, Raj Reddy grew up far from a computer lab. As a child in the 1940s, he lived in rural Katur, Andhra Pradesh, India. His one-room schoolhouse […]
Bacteria are in, around and all over us. They thrive in almost every corner of the planet, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to high up in the clouds, to the crevices of your ears, mouth, nose […]
In the fall of 2021, Malors Espinosa set out to devise a special type of math problem. As with any good research question, it would have to be thought-provoking, its solution nontrivial — something others […]
No device is an island: Your daily computational needs depend on more than just the microprocessors inside your computer or phone. Our modern world relies on “distributed computing,” which shares the computational load among multiple […]
Imagine standing on a railway platform watching a trolley go past. A girl on the trolley drops a bright red ball. To her, the ball falls straight down. But from the platform, you see the […]
It’s fair to say that enjoyment of a podcast would be severely limited without the human capacity to create and understand speech. That capacity has often been cited as a defining characteristic of our species, […]
If you follow any path of ancestry back far enough, you’ll reach the same single point. Whether you begin with gorillas or ginkgo trees or bacteria that live deep in the bowels of the Earth […]
David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike other creative processes, like making music, which can be heard, or painting […]
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