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It’s the year 2111. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft to hyperjump to distant solar systems and back to Earth. The drive promises to revolutionize space exploration. But there’s a catch. The new technology is finicky and can only make hyperjumps that follow certain numerical rules. Earth’s governing body has tapped … Read more

Machine learning is having a moment. Yet even while image generators like DALL·E 2 and language models like ChatGPT grab headlines, experts still don’t understand why they work so well. That makes it hard to understand how they might be manipulated. Consider, for instance, the software vulnerability known as a backdoor — an unobtrusive bit … Read more

Lek-Heng Lim longs for a renaissance that would reunite pure and applied mathematics. He points out that the distinction, which in modern math appears to be elemental, is in fact recent. “This break between pure and applied math happened in the last 80 years,” Lim said. “I would argue for a return to the old … Read more

In 2019, researchers announced that something appeared to be off with the sun. After 10 years of observations, they had concluded that the sun’s high-energy radiation was seven times more abundant than expected. Now a new study based on even higher-energy data has sharpened the picture. Researchers found that the solar gamma-ray excess persists at … Read more

In The Last of Us, a video game series and recent television show, fungal pathogens are to blame for a zombie-like plague. Once infected, humans lose control over their bodies and become increasingly aggressive, seeking to infect others through violence. It’s a familiar trope: The same fungus, Ophiocordyceps, torments humanity in the movie The Girl … Read more

For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense. “You can’t extract energy directly from the vacuum because there’s nothing there to give,” said William Unruh, a theoretical physicist at … Read more

Viruses are notorious as scourges of cellular life, destroying as ruthlessly as any predator. Yet as microbiologists are now piecing together, these killers also sometimes perish as prey. New research suggests that for some aquatic microorganisms, viruses can be a nutritious food source — delicious little bags chock-full of proteins, phosphorus and other yummy nutrients. … Read more

Last month, Karen Vogtmann and Michael Borinsky posted a proof that there is a truckload of mathematical structure within a hitherto inaccessible mathematical world called the moduli space of graphs, which Vogtmann and a collaborator first described in the mid-1980s. “That’s a super hard problem. It’s amazing they were able to,” said Dan Margalit, a … Read more

The world has learned two things in the past few months about large language models (LLMs) — the computational engines that power programs such as ChatGPT and Dall·E. The first is that these models appear to have the intelligence and creativity of a human. They offer detailed and lucid responses to written questions, or generate … Read more

The neocortex stands out as a stunning achievement of biological evolution. All mammals have this swath of tissue covering their brain, and the six layers of densely packed neurons within it handle the sophisticated computations and associations that produce cognitive prowess. Since no animals other than mammals have a neocortex, scientists have wondered how such … Read more

It’s been estimated that the human body contains about 60,000 miles of blood vessels. The heart has to pump blood through every inch of them unceasingly to meet the body’s bottomless needs for oxygen and nutrients. But because the heart has its own needs too, some of those vessels form a filigree of coronary arteries … Read more

In the fourth century, the Greek mathematician Pappus of Alexandria praised bees for their “geometrical forethought.” The hexagonal structure of their honeycomb seemed like the optimal way to partition two-dimensional space into cells of equal area and minimal perimeter — allowing the insects to cut down on how much wax they needed to produce, and … Read more

I have a confession: When I was 4, I was kicked out of ballet class for asking too many questions. I asked why a lot, like any kid. And I guess the teacher didn’t appreciate it. Luckily for me, the mathematician Steven Strogatz and the team at Quanta Magazine like to ask questions too. It’s … Read more

Over 60 years ago, Ralph Fox posed a problem about knots that haunts mathematicians to this day. His question is now often formulated as the “slice-ribbon conjecture,” which posits that two seemingly distinct groups of knots are actually the same. With its suggestion of elegant simplicity within the world of knots, it’s become one of … Read more

Imagine that your neighbor calls to ask a favor: Could you please feed their pet rabbit some carrot slices? Easy enough, you’d think. You can imagine their kitchen, even if you’ve never been there — carrots in a fridge, a drawer holding various knives. It’s abstract knowledge: You don’t know what your neighbor’s carrots and … Read more

Physicists have coaxed particles of light into undergoing opposite transformations simultaneously, like a human turning into a werewolf as the werewolf turns into a human. In carefully engineered circuits, the photons act as if time were flowing in a quantum combination of forward and backward. “For the first time ever, we kind of have a … Read more

For Shang-Hua Teng, theoretical computer science has never been purely theoretical. Now 58, Teng is a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California and a two-time winner of the Gödel Prize, an annual award recognizing groundbreaking theoretical work. But he often strives to connect that abstract theory to everyday life in ways … Read more

The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds for black holes — or, to be more precise, the event horizons of black holes — which must, according to … Read more

Space exploration requires tremendous precision. When you’re landing a rover on Mars 70 million miles away from the nearest service station, you need to maximize efficiency and prepare for the unexpected. This applies to everything from spacecraft design to data transmission: Those messages returning to Earth as a steady stream of 0s and 1s are … Read more

The cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last spring, extremely distant yet very bright galaxies immediately shone into the telescope’s field of view. “They were just so stupidly bright, and they just stood out,” said Rohan Naidu, an astronomer … Read more

In algorithms, as in life, negativity can be a drag. Consider the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a graph — a network of nodes connected by links, or edges. Often, these edges aren’t interchangeable: A graph could represent a road map on which some roads are slower than others or … Read more

A mother gives her baby her all: love, hugs, kisses … and a sturdy army of bacteria. These simple cells, which journey from mother to baby at birth and in the months of intimate contact that follow, form the first seeds of the child’s microbiome — the evolving community of symbiotic microorganisms tied to the … Read more

In a sunny lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two starfish fought over their prey. Overlapping arms pinned a hunk of thawing cocktail shrimp against the side of the tank. Thousands of suction cups rippled furiously against the glass as each echinoderm struggled to inch the prize toward its own maw. The physicist Nikta … Read more

Animals that produce many offspring tend to have short lives, while less prolific species tend to live longer. Cockroaches lay hundreds of eggs while living less than a year. Mice have dozens of babies during their year or two of life. Humpback whales produce only one calf every two or three years and live for … Read more

In what specific cases do quantum computers surpass their classical counterparts? That’s a hard question to answer, in part because today’s quantum computers are finicky things, plagued with errors that can pile up and spoil their calculations. By one measure, of course, they’ve already done it. In 2019, physicists at Google announced that they used … Read more

In 2021, the Hayabusa2 space mission successfully delivered a morsel of the asteroid 162173 Ryugu to Earth — five grams of the oldest, most pristine matter left over from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago. Last spring, scientists revealed that the chemical composition of the asteroid includes 10 amino acids, the building blocks … Read more

Every Quanta article, video and podcast has its own backstory. By the time it arrives on your screen, our staff has nurtured it through weeks (and sometimes months) of careful work: research, reporting, writing, editing, art direction, animation, filming, recording, fact-checking, copy editing and web production. Then it’s my turn. My job is to engage … Read more

We can think of a mathematician as a kind of archaeologist, painstakingly brushing dust off the hidden structures of the world. But the structures mathematicians reveal are not only durable, but also inevitable. They could never have been any other way. They are also remarkably interconnected: Though each year the mathematical frontier continues to expand … Read more

The year began right as the James Webb Space Telescope was unfurling its sunshield — the giant, nail-bitingly thin and delicate blanket that, once open, would plunge the observatory into frigid shade and open up its view of the infrared universe. Within hours of the ball dropping here in New York City, the sunshield could … Read more

As computer scientists tackle a greater range of problems, their work has grown increasingly interdisciplinary. This year, many of the most significant computer science results also involved other scientists and mathematicians. Perhaps the most practical involved the cryptographic questions underlying the security of the internet, which tend to be complicated mathematical problems. Source