The Earth’s atmosphere is nothing but freely roaming molecules. Left alone, they would drift and collide, and eventually even out into a mixture that’s dynamic, yet stable and broadly unchanging. The sun’s rays complicate things. […]
Tag: quantamagazine
There’s a simple story of the greenhouse effect: A blanket of carbon dioxide envelops the planet, letting sunlight in but trapping its heat. As a result, Earth warms. But how does this actually work? Carbon […]
In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out to investigate the potential future of a planet on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. He started by looking some 600 million years into […]
A gust of wind strikes the Sahara Desert, launching a speck of dust into the air. For a week, the grain rides atmospheric currents halfway around the globe, reflecting sparkles of sunlight back to space […]
Life has influenced Earth’s atmosphere going back billions of years. But until two centuries ago, when humans started burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, the most significant living climate controllers were organisms invisible to […]
Some 4 billion years after its creation, a small planet circling an unexceptional star in the outlying Orion-Cygnus spiral arm of the Milky Way enjoyed a brief and bustling season of complex life. The planet […]
A black hole unlike any seen before has been spotted in the early universe. It’s huge and appears to be essentially on its own, with few stars circling it. The object, which may represent a […]
Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on his screen. They pulsed, grew and blossomed into monarch butterflies. As the two butterflies grew, they smashed into each other, and one got the worst of […]
In 2010, biologists made a shocking discovery. Living in the mud of the North Sea were microorganisms whose genes looked a lot like ours. Genetic analysis revealed that humans, oak trees, blue whales — any […]
Faithful simulations of the world are impossible to create using ordinary computers. Simulating physical reality is, however, the original, express purpose of quantum computers. In 1981, long before quantum computers gained notoriety as potential tools […]
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