Faced with a threat, the brain has to act fast, its neurons making new connections to learn what might spell the difference between life and death. But in its response, the brain also raises the […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Imagine two friends hiking in the woods. They grow hungry and decide to split an apple, but half an apple feels meager. Then one of them remembers one of the strangest ideas she’s ever encountered. […]
Our June Insights puzzle added a few twists to a classic puzzle made famous by Martin Gardner in his 1965 Scientific American column and later published in the book The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles […]
Neuroscientists are the cartographers of the brain’s diverse domains and territories — the features and activities that define them, the roads and highways that connect them, and the boundaries that delineate them. Toward the front […]
In 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes’ secrets die with them. Random quantum jitter on the spherical outer boundary, or “event horizon,” of a black hole will cause the hole to radiate particles and […]
Graph theory isn’t enough. The mathematical language for talking about connections, which usually depends on networks — vertices (dots) and edges (lines connecting them) — has been an invaluable way to model real-world phenomena since […]
It’s a mere speck of matter — a piece of silica crystal no bigger than a virus, levitated in a light beam. But it is almost as motionless as the laws of physics permit. Two […]
Many aspects of modern applied research rely on a crucial algorithm called gradient descent. This is a procedure generally used for finding the largest or smallest values of a particular mathematical function — a process […]
The tiny rove beetle, no bigger than a grain of rice, looked dangerously exposed on the bottom of the glass dish in Joe Parker’s laboratory — and that was even before its fellow prisoner, an […]
In 1934, Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, theorized a strange kind of matter — a crystal made from electrons. The idea was simple; proving it wasn’t. Physicists tried many tricks over eight decades […]
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