Two young mathematicians have astonished their colleagues with a full proof of the Kahn-Kalai conjecture — a sweeping statement about how structure emerges in random sets and graphs. or | Continue reading
Van der Waerden’s conjecture mystified mathematicians for 85 years. Its solution shows how polynomial roots relate to one another. | Continue reading
The immune system protects us from a full spectrum of pathogens, but without balance, it can end up hurting us over time, too. The immunologist Shruti Naik explains how our defenses can turn on us. | Continue reading
Vijay Balasubramanian investigates whether the fabric of the universe might be built from information, and what it means that physicists can even ask such a question. | Continue reading
The Tonga eruption in January was “basically like Krakatoa 2.” This time, geophysicists could explain the tiny tsunamis that cropped up all over the planet, solving a 139-year-old mystery about Tonga’s predecessor. | Continue reading
For centuries, mathematicians have tried to prove that Euler’s fluid equations can produce nonsensical answers. A new approach to machine learning has researchers betting that “blowup” is near. | Continue reading
Life could use a more expansive genetic code in theory, but new work shows that improving on three-letter codons would be a challenge. | Continue reading
Learn the magic and math of how to win games when your opponent goes first. | Continue reading
A new analysis of W bosons suggests these particles are significantly heavier than predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. | Continue reading
Steven Strogatz explores the mysteries of knots with the mathematicians Colin Adams and Lisa Piccirillo. | Continue reading
The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity. | Continue reading
The optical properties of mitochondrial bundles in the retina may improve how efficiently the eye captures light. | Continue reading
The result could help researchers answer a larger question about flattening objects from the fourth dimension to the third dimension. | Continue reading
A new result shows that quantum information can theoretically be protected from errors just as well as classical information can. | Continue reading
Thanks to the power of fluctuation relations, physicists are taking the second law of thermodynamics to settings once thought impossible. | Continue reading
Lillian Pierce wants to transform access to the world of mathematics, while making headway on problems that bridge the discrete and continuous. | Continue reading
Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave. | Continue reading
Play this simple math game with your friends to gain insights into fundamental principles of graph theory. | Continue reading
The reasons why sleep is so vital often hide in unexpected parts of the body, as host Steven Strogatz discovers in conversations with researchers Dragana Rogulja and Alex Keene. | Continue reading
Dopamine, a neurochemical often associated with reward behavior, also seems to help organize precisely when the brain initiates movements. It’s the latest revelation about the power of neuromodulators. | Continue reading
Physicists are devising clever new ways to exploit the extreme sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. But so far, they’ve seen no signs of exotica. | Continue reading
The noted mathematician and author Steven Strogatz explains how the conversations with experts in his new Quanta Magazine podcast address his lifelong fascination with timeless mysteries. | Continue reading
Biomechanical interactions, rather than neurons, control the movements of one of the simplest animals. The discovery offers a glimpse into how animal behavior worked before neurons evolved. | Continue reading
An experiment conducted on hybrid matter-antimatter atoms has defied researchers’ expectations. | Continue reading
Traditional algorithms power complicated computational tools like machine learning. A new approach, called algorithms with predictions, uses the power of machine learning to improve algorithms. | Continue reading
Dwarf galaxies weren’t supposed to have big black holes. Their surprise discovery has revealed clues about how the universe’s biggest black holes could have formed. | Continue reading
A simple algorithm that revolutionizes how neural networks approach language is now taking on image classification as well. It may not stop there. | Continue reading
A new proof significantly strengthens a decades-old result about the ubiquity of ways to represent whole numbers as sums of unit fractions. | Continue reading
A new computer program fashioned after artificial intelligence systems like AlphaGo has solved several open problems in combinatorics and graph theory. | Continue reading
While watching a fearful memory take shape in the brain of a living fish, neuroscientists see an unexpected level of rewiring occur in the synaptic connections. | Continue reading
Dynamical systems can be chaotic and impossible to predict, but mathematicians have discovered tools to help understand them. | Continue reading
For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a… | Continue reading
When astronomers tried to confirm a signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, they saw nothing. | Continue reading
For the first time, experiments demonstrate the possibility of sharing secrets with perfect privacy — even when the devices used to share them cannot be trusted. | Continue reading
Answering three questions can help reveal how the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” fits into modern evolutionary theory. | Continue reading
How to win games by going second and leaving your opponent with no good options. | Continue reading
A 3D digital model of a “minimal cell” leads scientists closer to understanding the barest requirements for life. | Continue reading
Algorithms that use the brain’s communication signal can now work on analog neuromorphic chips, which closely mimic our energy-efficient brains. | Continue reading
Two recent collaborations between mathematicians and DeepMind demonstrate the potential of machine learning to help researchers generate new mathematical conjectures. | Continue reading
The strong force holds protons and neutrons together, but the theory behind it is largely inscrutable. Two new approaches show how it works. | Continue reading
His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences. | Continue reading
If only scientists understood exactly how electrons act in molecules, they’d be able to predict the behavior of everything from experimental drugs to high-temperature superconductors. | Continue reading
Two researchers show that for neural networks to be able to remember better, they need far more parameters than previously thought. | Continue reading
Researchers have mapped hundreds of semantic categories to the tiny bits of the cortex that represent them in our thoughts and perceptions. What they discovered might change our view of memory. | Continue reading
Three mathematicians show, for the first time, how to form a square with the same area as a circle by cutting them into interchangeable pieces that can be visualized. | Continue reading
Two teams have shown how quantum approaches can solve problems faster than classical computers, bringing physics and computer science closer together. | Continue reading
Infinite sums are among the most underrated yet powerful concepts in mathematics, capable of linking concepts across math’s vast web. | Continue reading
A team of mathematicians has solved an important question about how solutions to polynomial equations relate to sophisticated geometric objects called Shimura varieties. | Continue reading