One of the most important pieces of mathematical knowledge was on the verge of being lost, maybe forever. Now, a new book hopes to save it. The Disc Embedding Theorem rewrites a proof completed in […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In 1990, an international team of scientists began an ambitious attempt to sequence the human genome. By 2001 the Human Genome Project (HGP) had prepared a rough draft, and in April 2003, the draft sequence […]
The prospects for directly testing a theory of quantum gravity are poor, to put it mildly. To probe the ultra-tiny Planck scale, where quantum gravitational effects appear, you would need a particle accelerator as big […]
Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the two. As Alan Turing put it in 1952: “We are not […]
Imagine the human genome as a string stretching out for the length of a football field, with all the genes that encode proteins clustered at the end near your feet. Take two big steps forward; […]
In 2013, a masters student in physics named Paul Erker went combing through textbooks and papers looking for an explanation of what a clock is. “Time is what a clock measures,” Albert Einstein famously quipped; […]
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 […]
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 […]
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