An oak tree. The symbiotic fungus intertwined with its roots. A cardinal chirping from one of its branches. Our best clue yet to their shared ancestor might have arrived in electron microscope images that were […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Imagine an electron as a spherical cloud of negative charge. If that ball were ever so slightly less round, it could help explain fundamental gaps in our understanding of physics, including why the universe contains […]
The secret to fixing a fatal flaw at the heart of quantum theory may lie in three obscure textbooks from the 1980s. But physicists can be forgiven for overlooking the potentially transformative ideas within, as […]
In the children’s game telephone, a whispered phrase like “I ate a pear” can quickly become “I hate bears” as it moves down a line of players. As genes are passed down from parents to […]
In mid-November of last year, David Smith, a retired print technician and an aficionado of jigsaw puzzles, fractals and road maps, was doing one of his favorite things: playing with shapes. Using a software package […]
Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first general-purpose […]
All animals, plants, fungi and protists — which collectively make up the domain of life called eukaryotes — have genomes with a peculiar feature that has puzzled researchers for almost half a century: Their genes […]
One of the great episodes in the history of mathematics began on October 23, 1852. In a letter to Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Augustus De Morgan wrote, “A student of mine asked me today to […]
For around 20 years, astronomers have struggled to find an ancient group of stars mixed in with the gas, dust and newer stars of our galaxy’s bulge. These “fossil” stars preceded the Milky Way and […]
“For me, mathematics exists in the space between us,” Emmy Murphy wrote in accepting the 2020 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize. That space, for her, is a realm of art, perhaps even more than science. […]
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