Prochlorococcus bacteria are so small that you’d have to line up around a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are likely the most […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Pose a question to a Magic 8 Ball, and it’ll answer yes, no or something annoyingly indecisive. We think of it as a kid’s toy, but theoretical computer scientists employ a similar tool. They often […]
Far from being solo operators, most single-celled microbes are in complex relationships. In the ocean, the soil and your gut, they might battle and eat each other, exchange DNA, compete for nutrients, or feed on […]
Life is an anthology of destruction. Everything you build eventually breaks. Everyone you love will die. Any sense of order or stability inevitably crumbles. The entire universe follows a dismal trek toward a dull state […]
A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1 — […]
How do you construct a perfect machine out of imperfect parts? That’s the central challenge for researchers building quantum computers. The trouble is that their elementary building blocks, called qubits, are exceedingly sensitive to disturbance […]
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 […]
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 […]
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