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.... | Continue reading
Holiday-season traditions stretching back for centuries have linked wintertime romance to decorative sprigs of mistletoe. The way that the plant’s rounded evergreen leaves and white berries tightly hug the branches of... | Continue reading
Programmers normally want to minimize the time their code takes to execute. But in 1962, the Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó posed the opposite problem. He asked: How long can a... | Continue reading
A team of physicists in New York has discovered a material that conducts electricity with perfect efficiency at room temperature—a long-sought scientific milestone. The hydrogen, carbon and sulfur compound operates... | Continue reading
Even though mathematicians have spent over 2,000 years dissecting the structure of the five Platonic solids—the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron and dodecahedron—there’s still a lot we don’t know about them.... | Continue reading
In the late 2010s, Marijn Heule used a computerized proof technique called SAT solving (where SAT stands for “satisfiability”) to conquer an impressive list of math problems: The Pythagorean triples problem in 2016, Schur number... | Continue reading
When particle physicists try to model experiments, they confront an impossible calculation—an infinitely long equation that lies beyond the reach of modern mathematics. Fortunately, they can generate largely accurate predictions... | Continue reading
The atmosphere is such a roiling mess that it defies analysis even by today’s most sophisticated meteorological algorithms. But its complexity didn’t stop the French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace from cracking... | Continue reading
From large trees in the Amazon jungle to houseplants to seaweed in the ocean, green is the color that reigns over the plant kingdom. Why green, and not blue or... | Continue reading
The physicists who run the world’s most sensitive experimental search for dark matter have seen something strange. They have uncovered an unexpected excess of events inside their detector that could fit the... | Continue reading
When representation theory emerged in the late 19th century, many mathematicians questioned its worth. In 1897, the English mathematician William Burnside wrote that he doubted that this unorthodox perspective would... | Continue reading
Amid the chaotic chains of events that ensue when protons smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, one particle has popped up that appears to go to pieces... | Continue reading
On February 22, 2020—a lifetime ago now—the mathematician Priyam Patel was at Charles de Gaulle airport, waiting to catch a connecting flight home to Salt Lake City. She noticed a sign urging... | Continue reading
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory can sense movements thousands of times tinier than the width of an atom partly because of the instrument’s near-perfect mirrors. The mirrors bounce laser beams... | Continue reading
Imagine aliens landed on Earth and handed us certifiably correct answers to our most pressing questions: Does God exist? Is the Riemann hypothesis true? Did Oswald act alone?We’d appreciate... | Continue reading
What do the digits of pi, colliding blocks and quantum search algorithms have in common? More than you might expect. Two playful papers, one from 2003 and one from December of 2019, provide... | Continue reading
When engineers first endeavored to teach computers to see, they took it for granted that computers would see like humans. The first proposals for computer vision in the 1960s were... | Continue reading
Black hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors recently picked up the signal of an unexpectedly enormous black hole, one with a mass... | Continue reading
Aggressive cancers can spread so fiercely that they seem less like tissues gone wrong and more like invasive parasites looking to consume and then break free of their host. If... | Continue reading
My recent story for Quanta explained a newly proved phenomenon that might seem surprising from a naive perspective: Virtually all polynomials of a certain type are “prime,” meaning they can’t be factored.The proof... | Continue reading
Leonard Susskind, a pioneer of string theory, the holographic principle, and other big physics ideas spanning the past half-century, has proposed a solution to an important puzzle about black holes. The problem is that... | Continue reading
The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of... | Continue reading
Elliptic curves seem to admit infinite variety, but they really only come in two flavors. That is the upshot of a new proof from a graduate student at Harvard University.... | Continue reading
In August 2016, a research team claimed to have unearthed evidence of life in a remote outcrop of 3.7-billion-year-old rocks in Greenland. This bold claim not only pushed back the origin of... | Continue reading