Dazzling intricacies of brain structure are revealed every day, but one of the most obvious aspects of brain wiring eludes neuroscientists. The nervous system is cross-wired, so that the left side of the brain controls […]
Tag: quantamagazine
It’s not an exaggeration to say that every major advance in physics for more than a century has turned on revelations about symmetry. It’s there at the dawn of general relativity, in the birth of […]
Tracie Seimon discovered her passion for the natural world early. As a child growing up in Colorado, she enjoyed “harvesting insects” from her family backyard and keeping a hobby ant farm. When she saw trees […]
Despite the wild success of ChatGPT and other large language models, the artificial neural networks (ANNs) that underpin these systems might be on the wrong track. For one, ANNs are “super power-hungry,” said Cornelia Fermüller, […]
In the fall of 2017, Mehtaab Sawhney, then an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined a graduate reading group that set out to study a single paper over a semester. But by the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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