The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy […]
Tag: quantamagazine
History is full of backstabbing rivalries: Edison and Tesla, Harding and Kerrigan, Tupac and Biggie. No less dramatic was a 16th-century conflict between Italian mathematicians Gerolamo Cardano, a brilliant but troubled polymath, and Niccolò Fontana, […]
How do you teach mathematics to an artificial intelligence? AI has already bested humans at problem-solving tasks that include games like chess and Go. But before any task can be tackled by a machine, it […]
It sounds like one of the easiest experiments possible: Take two cups of water, one hot, one cold. Place both in a freezer and note which one freezes first. Common sense suggests that the colder […]
The aging brains of people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases are suffused with tell-tale aggregates of proteins in or around their neurons. How these protein clumps might be harming the neurons is often […]
Balance-scale puzzles abound in recreational mathematics. The essential element is the humble two-pan balance scale — a staple of commerce over the millennia that’s still found in bustling rural bazaars in the developing world. The […]
In 2009, a computer scientist then at Princeton University named Fei-Fei Li invented a data set that would change the history of artificial intelligence. Known as ImageNet, the data set included millions of labeled images […]
Imagine 100 dots scattered in front of you. In a haphazard variation on connect-the-dots, start drawing lines between the points. How many lines can you draw without producing a triangle? A square? An 11-pointed star? […]
Perhaps the most famously weird feature of quantum mechanics is nonlocality: Measure one particle in an entangled pair whose partner is miles away, and the measurement seems to rip through the intervening space to instantaneously […]
In the United States and some other countries, the Covid-19 pandemic has entered a paradoxical stage in which the coronavirus has evolved into a highly contagious variant and sent cases soaring, but the public’s attitude […]
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