The marine creatures called skates skim along the sea bottom, rippling their winglike pectoral fins to propel themselves and to stir up small creatures hiding in the sand. Their unusual flattened body plan makes them […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Renate Loll has seen universes that would give Doctor Strange nightmares. She’s explored 3D worlds, flatlands and fractured realities with fractional dimensions. She’s seen universes with gentle curves and universes exploding with violent spikes. She’s […]
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals […]
Have you ever admired how the slats of a hardwood floor fit together so cleanly, or how the hexagons underneath your bathroom rug perfectly meet up? These are examples of geometric tilings, arrangements of shapes […]
How do brains learn? It’s a mystery, one that applies both to the spongy organs in our skulls and to their digital counterparts in our machines. Even though artificial neural networks (ANNs) are built from […]
On June 27, 2010, the FBI arrested 10 Russian spies who lived and worked as American professionals near New York City. The case, which unraveled an intricate system of false identities and clandestine meetings, exposed […]
By definition, the universe seems like it should be the totality of everything that exists. Yet a variety of arguments emerging from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics hint that there could also be unobservable […]
Memories are shadows of the past but also flashlights for the future. Our recollections guide us through the world, tune our attention and shape what we learn later in life. Human and animal studies have […]
In 2009, a pair of astronomers at the Paris Observatory announced a startling discovery. After building a detailed computational model of our solar system, they ran thousands of numerical simulations, projecting the motions of the […]
During fleeting fits, the sun occasionally hurls a colossal amount of energy into space. Called solar flares, these eruptions last for mere minutes, and they can trigger catastrophic blackouts and dazzling auroras on Earth. But […]
Recent Comments