Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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4
hours ago
A Treasure Trove of Cambrian Fossils Rewrites the Story of Early Life
Roughly 540 million years ago, toward the start of the Cambrian Period, the planet was mostly ocean, and life was both alien and vaguely familiar. Small, phallic-looking worms rummaged through ocean-floor sediments while blind swimming beasts flung out whiplike tentacles to ensnare prey. Meanwhile, early versions of mollusks and sponges populated the seafloor as jellyfish floated above. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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2
days ago
Why Math’s Final Axiom Proved So Controversial
How do mathematicians decide that something is true? They write a proof. Often they start with proofs that already exist, building on or drawing connections between proven claims. Each of these proofs, in turn, has relied on other proofs to make its point, and so on. Proofs upon proofs. Truths upon truths. But eventually this process must come to an end. At some point, things are true simply… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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2
days ago
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
Doron Zeilberger is a mathematician who believes that all things come to an end. That just as we are limited beings, so too does nature have boundaries and therefore so do numbers. Look out the window, and where others see reality as a continuous expanse, flowing inexorably forward from moment to moment, Zeilberger sees a universe that ticks. It is a discrete machine. In the smooth motion of the… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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4
days ago
Physicists Discover the Most Complex Forms of Ice Yet
Ice comes in more forms than what you’ll find in a freezer or a glacier. Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity. Ice is the name for any phase of water that is solid and crystalline, meaning that it has a repeating molecular structure. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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7
days ago
A New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience
Every experience we have changes our brain, the way a ceramicist reshapes a slab of clay. Every corner we turn, every conversation we have, every shudder we feel causes cascading effects: Chemicals are released, electricity surges, the connections between brain cells tighten, and our mental models update. The brain is “incredibly plastic, and it stays that way throughout the lifespan of a human,”… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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9
days ago
A Powerful New ‘QR Code’ Untangles Math’s Knottiest Knots
From the tangle in your computer cord to the mess your cat made of your knitting basket, knots are everywhere in daily life. They also pervade science, showing up in loops of DNA, intertwined polymer strands, and swirling water currents. And within pure mathematics, knots are the key to many central questions in topology. Yet knot theorists still struggle with the most basic of questions: how to… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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11
days ago
What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels?
You’re the earliest known life form. There’s no food around right now. It would be great to go somewhere else. But you’re stuck. Really stuck. At your size (a couple of microns), water feels like tar, or rather, it feels the way being stuck in tar will eventually feel to a human. What do you do? You’ve found the perfect solution. Literally perfect. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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14
days ago
Quantum ‘Jamming’ Explores the Truly Fundamental Principles of Nature
For the past few decades, researchers have understood that quantum computers should eventually be able to crack the widely used codes that secure much of the digital world. To protect against this fate, they’ve spent years developing new codes that appear to be safe from future safecrackers armed with quantum computers. At the same time, they’ve also devised ingenious ways to use the rules of… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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16
days ago
The Ancient Weapons Active in Your Immune System Today
Evolutionary arms races where one species is pitted against another, driving the evolution of new or more sophisticated weapons as each tries to gain the upper hand are ubiquitous in nature. One of the oldest and fiercest battles has been waged for billions of years between bacteria and the viruses that infect them. This escalating warfare has selected for bacteriophage viruses (or “phages”)… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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18
days ago
The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived
The tipping point came in the summer of 2025. That July, several artificial intelligence models solved five out of six problems at the International Mathematical Olympiad, an annual challenge for some of the world’s best high school students. But while mathematicians were shocked few had expected the programs to get that good that quickly the impressive results didn’t necessarily mean that AI… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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21
days ago
Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI?
In fall 2024, the best-selling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari went on the talk show Morning Joe. “Let me tell you one small story,” he said. “When OpenAI developed GPT-4, they wanted to test what this thing can do. So they gave it a test to solve captcha puzzles.” Those are the visual puzzles warped numbers and letters that prove to a website that you’re not a robot. GPT-4 couldn’t… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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23
days ago
Experiments Ring the ‘Death Knell’ for Sterile Neutrinos
Neutrinos have about as little influence as a particle can have. They have essentially no heft, no electric charge, and no “color” charge. As a result, the neutrino has no connection with most of nature’s forces; it can slip through whole planets and stars without striking a single atom. But neutrinos have proven more than capable of bending the life path of a scientist. In the late 1990s… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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25
days ago
An Arctic Road Trip Brings Vital Underground Networks into View
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. One Tuesday in June 2025, a white Chevy Suburban set off down the northernmost highway in North America. The sun of Alaska’s polar summer hadn’t set in 40 days, and it wouldn’t set again for another 35. But for Michael Van Nuland, the biologist in the driver’s seat, time was already running out. The SUV, packed with four days of fieldwork… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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28
days ago
New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics and shook the world. Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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30
days ago
A Through-The-Lens Look at the World’s Particle Physics Labs
Last summer, a wedding photographer walked begrudgingly into a physics laboratory outside Rome. Feeling uninspired by the intricate machinery around him, he decided to turn off the lights. “I wanted to create a world that was a bit more intimate,” said the photographer, Marco Donghia. He had been brought into the lab to participate in a photography contest by his sister Raffaella Donghia… Source
