Every organism responds to the world with an intricate cascade of biochemistry. There’s a source of heat here, a faint scent of food there, or the crack of a twig as something moves nearby. Each […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if — preferably, when — […]
Optimization problems can be tricky, but they make the world work better. These kinds of questions, which strive for the best way of doing something, are absolutely everywhere. Your phone’s GPS calculates the shortest route […]
Summer Haag and Clyde Kertzer had high hopes for their summer research project. Blindsiding an entire subfield of mathematics was not one of them. In May, Haag was finishing her first year of graduate school […]
Summer Haag and Clyde Kertzer had high hopes for their summer research project. Blindsiding an entire subfield of mathematics was not one of them. In May, Haag was finishing her first year of graduate school […]
Seven years ago, researchers showed that they could strip cells down to their barest fundamentals, creating a life form with the smallest genome that still allowed it to grow and divide in the lab. But […]
For decades, astronomers have been perplexed by planetary magnetic fields. In our own solar system, there is no rule that explains which worlds generate these magnetic sheaths: Earth, for example, has one, but its sister […]
Biologists have understood the broad contours of the rules of inheritance for more than a century: that genes are passed down from parent to child within species. But in more recent years, they have also […]
In August 2013, dozens of renowned theoretical physicists gathered in Santa Barbara, California, to discuss a crisis. Their tenuous understanding of black holes was falling apart. Viewed from afar, as if through a telescope, a […]
Richard Dedekind was a 19th-century mathematical giant, responsible for reshaping the field right down to its foundations. He was the first to give a rigorous definition of infinity; he also came up with the definition […]
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