Tag: quantamagazine

For decades, neuroscientists have treated the brain somewhat like a Geiger counter: The rate at which neurons fire is taken as a measure of activity, just as a Geiger counter’s click rate indicates the strength […]

During his doctoral research on the ties between aging and mitochondria, Martin Picard frequently saw micrographs of those energy-producing organelles. Yet it wasn’t until fairly late in his graduate work that he first watched sped-up […]

Understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the population means knowing more than just the total number of infections and deaths. As with many diseases, after the acute infection has passed, a constellation of […]

In July 1967, at the height of the Cold War, American satellites that had been launched to look for Soviet nuclear weapons tests found something wholly unexpected. The Vela 3 and 4 satellites observed brief […]

Once upon a time in a country far, far away, there was a champion athlete who could literally swim circles around his competition. He wished to train for the circle swimming world championship, but on […]

Back at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, before the disease had even drawn the attention of much of the world, researchers in China and Australia mapped the genome of the coronavirus isolated from one […]

Nathan Seiberg, 64, still does a lot of the electrical work and even some of the plumbing around his house in Princeton, New Jersey. It’s an interest he developed as a kid growing up in […]

The first episode of Sesame Street in 1969 included a segment called “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.” Viewers were asked to consider a poster that displayed three 2s and one W, […]

Living as they do in the distant, sun-forsaken reaches of the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, the gas giants, and Uranus and Neptune, the ice giants, were always expected to be frosty realms. But when […]

Smell, rather than sight, reigns as the supreme sense for most animals. It allows them to find food, avoid danger and attract mates; it dominates their perceptions and guides their behavior; it dictates how they […]