In 2021, the Hayabusa2 space mission successfully delivered a morsel of the asteroid 162173 Ryugu to Earth — five grams of the oldest, most pristine matter left over from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion […]
In 2021, the Hayabusa2 space mission successfully delivered a morsel of the asteroid 162173 Ryugu to Earth — five grams of the oldest, most pristine matter left over from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion […]
In mid-October, Justin Gilmer flew from California to New York to attend a friend’s wedding. While on the East Coast he visited his former adviser, Michael Saks, a mathematician at Rutgers University, where Gilmer had […]
Every Quanta article, video and podcast has its own backstory. By the time it arrives on your screen, our staff has nurtured it through weeks (and sometimes months) of careful work: research, reporting, writing, editing, […]
We can think of a mathematician as a kind of archaeologist, painstakingly brushing dust off the hidden structures of the world. But the structures mathematicians reveal are not only durable, but also inevitable. They could […]
As computer scientists tackle a greater range of problems, their work has grown increasingly interdisciplinary. This year, many of the most significant computer science results also involved other scientists and mathematicians. Perhaps the most practical […]
Carbon can arrange itself into one of the hardest materials in nature, or into one so soft that children inscribe trails of it on paper. Several decades ago, scientists started wondering: Aside from diamond and […]
Nature, red in tooth and claw, is rife with organisms that eat their neighbors to get ahead. But in the systems studied by the theoretical ecologist Holly Moeller, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution and […]
One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard — and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire plane […]
Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were […]
Many years ago, I learned to program on an old Symbolics Lisp Machine. The operating system had a built-in command spelled “DWIM,” short for “Do What I Mean.” If I typed a command and got […]
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