Bookmarks (62)

How do immature egg cells maintain genetic quality for decades before they mature? Scientists find unusual safeguards in this quiescent cell that may inform research into fertility. The post How ‘Idle’ Egg Cells Defend Their DNA From Damage first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Researchers are drawing on ideas from game theory to improve large language models and make them more consistent. The post Game Theory Can Make AI More Correct and Efficient first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes. The post New AI Tools Predict How Life’s Building Blocks Assemble first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Perhaps dark matter is made of an entirely different kind of particle than the ones physicists have been searching for. New experiments are springing up to look for these ultra-lightweight phantoms. The post Dogged Dark Matter Hunters Find New Hiding Places to Check first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In 1940 André Weil wrote a letter to his sister, Simone, outlining his vision for translating between three distinct areas of mathematics. Eighty years later, it still animates many of the most exciting developments in the field. The post A Rosetta Stone for Mathematics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size. The post The Mystery of the Missing Multicellular Prokaryotes first appeared on Quanta Magazine

After years of false starts, a team of computer scientists has found a way to efficiently deduce the Hamiltonian of a physical system at any constant temperature. The post Scientists Find a Fast Way to Describe Quantum Systems first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Four mathematicians broke a 75-year-old record by finding a denser way to pack high-dimensional spheres. The post To Pack Spheres Tightly, Mathematicians Throw Them at Random first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity. The post How a NASA Probe Solved a Scorching Solar Mystery first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “meaning” into concrete, testable ideas. The post Does AI Know What an Apple Is? She Aims to Find Out. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Human nutrition begins with milk, but the wondrous biofluid does much more than feed babies. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz speaks with molecular nutritionist Elizabeth Johnson about her research into the impact of human milk on a healthy microbiome. The post What Does Milk Do for Babies? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems. Has the powerful metaphor lost its mathematical meaning? The post Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Using machine learning, string theorists are finally showing how microscopic configurations of extra dimensions translate into sets of elementary particles — though not yet those of our universe. The post AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes. The post Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness. The post Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Researchers have shown how to find the simplest description of a data set faster than by simply checking every possibility. The post Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade. The post Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely how much pleasure and pain animals experience during different forms of touch. The post Pleasure or Pain? He Maps the Neural Circuits That Decide. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians think abstract tools from a field called symplectic geometry might help with planning missions to far-off moons and planets. The post Geometers Engineer New Tools to Wrangle Spacecraft Orbits first appeared on Quanta Magazine

By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. The post How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Founding editor-in-chief Thomas Lin looks back at a decade of Quanta journalism and forward to what’s next for the magazine. The post My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine first appeared on Quanta Magazine

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community. The post Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Black holes are inescapable traps for most of what falls into them — but there can be exceptions. The theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind speaks with co-host Janna Levin about the black hole information paradox and how it has propelled modern physics. The post Can Information Escape a Black Hole? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more. The post Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians have struggled to prove Falconer’s Conjecture, a simple, but far-reaching, hypothesis about the distances between points. They’re finally getting close. The post Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The timing of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024, will be known to within a second, thousands of years after fearful humans first started trying to anticipate these cosmic events. The post How the Ancient Art of Eclipse Prediction Became an Exact Science first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A generation of physicists has referred to the dark energy that permeates the universe as “the cosmological constant.” Now the largest map of the cosmos to date hints that this mysterious energy has been changing over billions of years. The post Dark Energy May Be Weakening, Major Astrophysics Study Finds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

After a decade out of the spotlight, the brain cells once alleged to explain empathy, autism and theory of mind are being refined and redefined. The post Overexposure Distorted the Science of Mirror Neurons first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians have illuminated what sets of points can look like if the distances between them are all whole numbers. The post Merging Fields, Mathematicians Go the Distance on Old Problem first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Our brain waves can align when we work and play closely together. The phenomenon, known as interbrain synchrony, suggests that collaboration is biological. The post The Social Benefits of Getting Our Brains in Sync first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. From chaotic assemblies of life, order somehow emerges. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz interviews the evolutionary ecologist Iain Couzin about how and why collective behaviors arise. The post How Is Flocking Like Computing? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Russell Impagliazzo studies hard problems, the limits of cryptography, the nature of randomness and more. The post The Researcher Who Explores Computation by Conjuring New Worlds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians are using topological abstractions to find places where it’s hard to vote. The post Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In the search for the most scalable hardware to use for quantum computers, qubits made of individual atoms are having a breakout moment. The post The Best Qubits for Quantum Computing Might Just Be Atoms first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Recursion builds bridges between ideas from across different math classes and illustrates the power of creative mathematical thinking. The post Math That Connects Where We’re Going to Where We’ve Been first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are beginning to understand why. The post How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The French mathematician spent decades developing a set of tools now widely used for taming random processes. The post Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres. The post Doubts Grow About the Biosignature Approach to Alien-Hunting first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Electroconvulsive therapy is highly effective in treating major depressive disorder, but no one knows why it works. New research suggests it may restore balance between excitation and inhibition in the brain. The post Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Explain Value of Shock Therapy first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces and pressures inside a subatomic particle for the first time. The post Swirling Forces, Crushing Pressures Measured in the Proton first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Teleporting people through space is still science fiction. But quantum teleportation is dramatically different and entirely real. In this episode, Janna Levin interviews the theoretical physicist John Preskill about teleporting bits and the promise of quantum technology. The post What Is Quantum Teleportation? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The recipient of the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics discusses math as art, math as language, and math as abstract thought. The post ‘The Rest of the World Disappears’: Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The visual systems of an obscure group of mollusks provide a rare natural example of path-dependent evolution, in which a critical fork in the creatures’ past determined their evolutionary futures. The post Mollusk Eyes Reveal How Future Evolution Depends on the Past first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Time is all around us: in the language we use, in the memories we revisit and in our predictions of the future. But what exactly is it? The physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek joins Steve Strogatz to discuss the fundamental hallmarks of time. The post What Is the Nature of Time? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Simple rules in simple settings continue to puzzle mathematicians, even as they devise intricate tools to analyze them. The post ‘Entropy Bagels’ and Other Complex Structures Emerge From Simple Rules first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A series of advances seemed to promise the impossible: the existence of quantum states that would never, ever fall into disarray. But physicists are now discovering that the pull of disorder may not be so easily overcome. The post A Quantum Trick Implied Eternal Stability. Now the Idea May Be Falling Apart. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Two researchers have proved that Penrose tilings, famous patterns that never repeat, are mathematically equivalent to a kind of quantum error correction. The post Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Play Quanta Magazine’s daily interactive math game, Hyperjumps! The post Hyperjumps Math Game first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The surprisingly subtle geometry of a familiar game shows how quickly math gets complicated. The post Unfolding the Mysteries of Polygonal Billiards first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Highly repetitive regions of junk DNA may be the key to a newly discovered mechanism for gene regulation. The post A ‘Lobby’ Where a Molecule Mob Tells Genes What to Do first appeared on Quanta Magazine