Our species owes a lot to opposable thumbs. But if evolution had given us extra thumbs, things probably wouldn’t have improved much. One thumb per hand is enough. Not so for neural networks, the leading […]
Tag: quantamagazine
We often think of memory as a rerun of the past — a mental duplication of events and sensations that we’ve experienced. In the brain, that would be akin to the same patterns of neural […]
Around 450 BCE, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae had some time to think. The Greek mathematician was in prison for claiming the sun was not a god, but rather an incandescent rock as big as the Peloponnese […]
In 2018, climate simulations were the third-largest use of computing cycles at a leading U.S. supercomputing cluster. The study of quarks and other subatomic particles came in second. Topping the list was the most heavily […]
For Valeria Saggio to boot up the computer in her former Vienna lab, she needed a special crystal, only as big as her fingernail. Saggio would place it gently into a small copper box, a […]
In a striking proof posted in September, three mathematicians have solved a 30-year-old problem called the André-Oort conjecture and advanced the centuries-long quest to understand the solutions of polynomial equations. The work draws on ideas […]
Chromosomes, the bundles of DNA that star in the mitotic ballet of cell division, play a leading role in complex life. But the question of how chromosomes came to exist and evolve has long been […]
Do you think there’s a triangle whose angles measure 41, 76 and 63 degrees? At first, answering this may seem easy. From geometry class we know that the sum of the measures of the interior […]
Our sun is getting brighter. If you could travel back in time to the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, you’d find a star that was about 30% dimmer than it is […]
Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve […]
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