Does an unseen force lurk within genetics? Biologists have made enormous strides over the past 100 years in understanding the role of the millions of parcels that convey our genetic information — DNA, RNA and […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Yael Tauman Kalai is a pioneering theoretical computer scientist who’s won impressive awards and changed the way people think about the internet. But as a kid, she wasn’t exactly a model student. “I was a […]
Aristotle argued almost 2,400 years ago that a perfect vacuum could never exist. Today, the concept of nothingness figures at least implicitly into almost every theory of modern physics. In this episode closing out season […]
On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory […]
Like a bright city in the middle of a barren desert, our galactic neighborhood is enveloped by a cosmic void — an enormous, almost unfathomably empty pocket of space. Recently, sky surveys have spotted thousands […]
Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled into a surreal world. Ling realized that the […]
In math, as in life, small choices can have big consequences. This is especially true in graph theory, a field that studies networks of objects and the connections between them. Here’s a little puzzle to […]
Imagine you visit a maze with some friends. You emerge from the exit shortly after going in, and wait around for hours before your friends emerge. Naturally, they ask about the path you took — […]
For decades, a simple question has haunted Máté Matolcsi, a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. How much of an infinite plane can you color in while making sure that no two […]
While much of our planet’s air and seas are stirred at a tempest’s whim, some features are far more regular. At the equator, thousand-kilometer-long waves persist amid the chaos. In both the ocean and the […]
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