Over 60 years ago, Ralph Fox posed a problem about knots that haunts mathematicians to this day. His question is now often formulated as the “slice-ribbon conjecture,” which posits that two seemingly distinct groups of […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Imagine that your neighbor calls to ask a favor: Could you please feed their pet rabbit some carrot slices? Easy enough, you’d think. You can imagine their kitchen, even if you’ve never been there — […]
Over the last few decades, an idea called the critical brain hypothesis has been helping neuroscientists understand how the human brain operates as an information-processing powerhouse. It posits that the brain is always teetering between […]
A group of astronomers poring over data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has glimpsed light from a rare isotope of helium in a distant galaxy, which could indicate the presence of the universe’s […]
Physicists have coaxed particles of light into undergoing opposite transformations simultaneously, like a human turning into a werewolf as the werewolf turns into a human. In carefully engineered circuits, the photons act as if time […]
People often think they know what causes chronic depression. Surveys indicate that more than 80% of the public blames a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. That idea is widespread in pop psychology and cited in […]
For Shang-Hua Teng, theoretical computer science has never been purely theoretical. Now 58, Teng is a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California and a two-time winner of the Gödel Prize, an […]
The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds […]
Space exploration requires tremendous precision. When you’re landing a rover on Mars 70 million miles away from the nearest service station, you need to maximize efficiency and prepare for the unexpected. This applies to everything […]
The cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last spring, extremely distant yet very bright galaxies immediately shone into the […]
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