We often think of memory as a rerun of the past — a mental duplication of events and sensations that we’ve experienced. In the brain, that would be akin to the same patterns of neural […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Around 450 BCE, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae had some time to think. The Greek mathematician was in prison for claiming the sun was not a god, but rather an incandescent rock as big as the Peloponnese […]
In 2018, climate simulations were the third-largest use of computing cycles at a leading U.S. supercomputing cluster. The study of quarks and other subatomic particles came in second. Topping the list was the most heavily […]
For Valeria Saggio to boot up the computer in her former Vienna lab, she needed a special crystal, only as big as her fingernail. Saggio would place it gently into a small copper box, a […]
In a striking proof posted in September, three mathematicians have solved a 30-year-old problem called the André-Oort conjecture and advanced the centuries-long quest to understand the solutions of polynomial equations. The work draws on ideas […]
Chromosomes, the bundles of DNA that star in the mitotic ballet of cell division, play a leading role in complex life. But the question of how chromosomes came to exist and evolve has long been […]
Do you think there’s a triangle whose angles measure 41, 76 and 63 degrees? At first, answering this may seem easy. From geometry class we know that the sum of the measures of the interior […]
Our sun is getting brighter. If you could travel back in time to the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, you’d find a star that was about 30% dimmer than it is […]
Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve […]
Artificial intelligence is largely a numbers game. When deep neural networks, a form of AI that learns to discern patterns in data, began surpassing traditional algorithms 10 years ago, it was because we finally had […]
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