The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their pioneering work in the development of mRNA vaccine technology, which made possible a timely […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Imagine you’re rolling down the street in a driverless car when you see a problem ahead. An Amazon delivery driver got their van halfway past a double-parked UPS truck before realizing they couldn’t make it […]
Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an […]
For a pathogen to make us sick, it must overcome a lot. First it has to enter the body, bypassing natural barriers such as skin, mucus, cilia and stomach acid. Then it needs to reproduce; […]
Marie Delattre was studying the sexual reproduction practices of microscopic worms when she noticed something unexpected. Under the microscope, an embryo of the nematode Mesorhabditis belari was dividing as it should, progressing from one cell […]
Imagine an endless piece of blank paper covered with a smattering of lines pointing every which way. A gust of wind comes and sprinkles dust on top of the paper — in effect covering the […]
“There are five fundamental operations in mathematics,” the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said. “Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modular forms.” Part of the joke, of course, is that one of those is not like […]
Cynthia Chiang always wanted to work with her hands. Although it may sound counterintuitive, it’s what led her to the fairly abstract field of observational cosmology: studying the cosmos’s origin and development by gathering data […]
The tools of artificial intelligence — neural networks in particular — have been good to physicists. For years, this technology has helped researchers reconstruct particle trajectories in accelerator experiments, search for evidence of new particles, […]
Just as people in different places seem to operate at different rhythms, so too do different species. They age at their own rates: Some, like the fruit fly, race to adulthood so they can reproduce […]
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