Fuzzy bumblebees, like tiny orange sheep, flit between the lilies that blanket the understory of an Argentinian forest, fertilizing the flowers and getting nourishment for themselves. In an ancient hay meadow in England, dance flies […]
Tag: quantamagazine
It’s the year 2111. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft to hyperjump to distant solar systems and back to Earth. The drive promises to revolutionize space exploration. But there’s a catch. […]
Machine learning is having a moment. Yet even while image generators like DALL·E 2 and language models like ChatGPT grab headlines, experts still don’t understand why they work so well. That makes it hard to […]
Lek-Heng Lim longs for a renaissance that would reunite pure and applied mathematics. He points out that the distinction, which in modern math appears to be elemental, is in fact recent. “This break between pure […]
The Neumayer III polar station sits near the edge of Antarctica’s unforgiving Ekström Ice Shelf. During the winter, when temperatures can plunge below minus 50 degrees Celsius and the winds can climb to more than […]
In 2019, researchers announced that something appeared to be off with the sun. After 10 years of observations, they had concluded that the sun’s high-energy radiation was seven times more abundant than expected. Now a […]
In The Last of Us, a video game series and recent television show, fungal pathogens are to blame for a zombie-like plague. Once infected, humans lose control over their bodies and become increasingly aggressive, seeking […]
For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense. “You […]
Viruses are notorious as scourges of cellular life, destroying as ruthlessly as any predator. Yet as microbiologists are now piecing together, these killers also sometimes perish as prey. New research suggests that for some aquatic […]
Last month, Karen Vogtmann and Michael Borinsky posted a proof that there is a truckload of mathematical structure within a hitherto inaccessible mathematical world called the moduli space of graphs, which Vogtmann and a collaborator […]
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