The biophysicist Manu Prakash vividly remembers the moment, late one night in a colleague’s laboratory a dozen years ago, when he peered into a microscope and met his new obsession. The animal beneath the lenses […]
Tag: quantamagazine
For decades, researchers have toyed with antimatter while searching for new laws of physics. These laws would come in the form of forces or other phenomena that would strongly favor matter over antimatter, or vice […]
Algorithms — the chunks of code that allow programs to sort, filter and combine data, among other things — are the standard tools of modern computing. Like tiny gears inside a watch, algorithms execute well-defined […]
In 2008, Marta Volonteri helped develop a radical proposal: Astronomers should search the smallest of galaxies for colossal black holes — hulking behemoths weighing many thousands of solar masses. If they could find them, she […]
Imagine going to your local hardware store and seeing a new kind of hammer on the shelf. You’ve heard about this hammer: It pounds faster and more accurately than others, and in the last few […]
Number theorists are always looking for hidden structure. And when confronted by a numerical pattern that seems unavoidable, they test its mettle, trying hard — and often failing — to devise situations in which a […]
Billions of years ago, some unknown location on the sterile, primordial Earth became a cauldron of complex organic molecules from which the first cells emerged. Origin-of-life researchers have proposed countless imaginative ideas about how that […]
Last March, Iowa State University mathematicians Leslie Hogben and Carolyn Reinhart received a welcome surprise. Adam Wagner, a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, emailed to let them know he’d answered a question they’d published […]
Imagine that while you are enjoying your morning bowl of Cheerios, a spider drops from the ceiling and plops into the milk. Years later, you still can’t get near a bowl of cereal without feeling […]
In 1885, King Oscar II of Sweden announced a public challenge consisting of four mathematical problems. The French polymath Henri Poincaré focused on one related to the motion of celestial bodies, the so-called n-body problem. […]
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