Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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10
hours ago
RNA Is the Cell’s Emergency Alert System
When the sun shines on your skin, what does it hit? When it causes a burn, what went wrong? Underneath that pain is your cells’ emergency response to DNA damage. When a hazard, such as ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation or certain chemicals, damages DNA, the cell needs to respond at breakneck speed. Ideally it either repairs the damage to its genomic information repository… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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3
days ago
The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus
On June 23, 2025, Tony Tyson joined a presentation in Washington, D.C., to unveil an image almost 30 years in the making: 10 million galaxies poised on an inky black backdrop. To appreciate each galaxy in detail, you’d have to stretch the picture across 400 TVs. It’s the first portrait of the cosmos delivered by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new astronomical facility built by the United States… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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4
days ago
How Can Regional Models Advance Climate Science?
Climate models have changed the way we view the world. While effective, these models are imperfect, and scientists are constantly looking at ways to improve their accuracy and predictability. MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir has spent decades developing complex models to understand how climate change affects vulnerable regions like the Nile Basin and Singapore. In this episode of The Joy of Why… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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5
days ago
Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies
Randomness is a source of power. From the coin toss that decides which team gets the ball to the random keys that secure online interactions, randomness lets us make choices that are fair and impossible to predict. But in many computing applications, suitable randomness can be hard to generate. So instead, programmers often rely on things called hash functions, which swirl data around and… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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7
days ago
New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source
In math, the search for optimal patterns never ends. The sphere-packing problem — which asks how to cram balls into a (high-dimensional) box as efficiently as possible — is no exception. It has enticed mathematicians for centuries and has important applications in cryptography, long-distance communication and more. It’s deceptively difficult. In the early 17th century… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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11
days ago
How Smell Guides Our Inner World
When Thomas Hummel gets a whiff of an unripe, green tomato, he finds himself in his childhood home in Bavaria. Under the tilted ceilings of the bedroom that he shared with his two older brothers, there were three beds, a simple table and a cupboard. “My mother put those green tomatoes on the cupboard for them to ripen,” said Hummel, an olfaction researcher at the Carl Gustav Carus University… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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12
days ago
Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) may not glitter quite like the night sky, plunked as it is between Michigan State University’s chemistry department and the performing arts center. Inside, though, the lab is teeming with substances that are otherwise found only in stars. Here, atomic nuclei accelerate to half the speed of light, smash into a target and shatter into smithereens. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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14
days ago
Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity
We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems that can beat us in chess, analyze huge reams of text and compose sonnets. This has been one of the great surprises of the modern era: physical tasks that are easy for humans turn out to be very difficult for robots, while algorithms are increasingly able to mimic our intellect. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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17
days ago
When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color?
The natural world is awash with color, and many of these vibrant hues are meant to be seen. Apples blush red to coax animals to spread their seeds, lavender blooms are violet to lure in pollinating bees, and male peacocks trailed by flashy blue trains more successfully attract mates. However, the world is colorful only for some of us. These vivid signals can be perceived by animals that can see… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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18
days ago
How Does Graph Theory Shape Our World?
Born in the 18th century when Leonhard Euler solved the puzzle of the seven bridges of Königsberg, graph theory has become a foundational tool in mathematics. It studies relationships through nodes (vertices) and the links (edges) that connect them, transforming the complexity of systems — from friendship networks to airline routes — into elegant abstractions that reveal underlying structure and… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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19
days ago
A New Pyramid-Like Shape Always Lands the Same Side Up
In 360 BCE, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an arrangement of five geometric shapes: flat-sided solids called polyhedra. These immediately became important objects of mathematical study. So it might be surprising that, millennia later, mysteries still surround even the simplest shape in Plato’s polyhedral universe: the tetrahedron, which has just four triangular faces. One major open problem… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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21
days ago
Matter vs. Force: Why There Are Exactly Two Types of Particles
Beneath the richness of our world lies a pristine simplicity. Everything is made of a set of just 17 fundamental particles, and those particles, though they may differ by mass or charge, come in just two basic types. Each is either a “boson” or a “fermion.” The physicist Paul Dirac coined both terms in a speech in 1945, naming the two particle kingdoms after physicists who helped elucidate their… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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24
days ago
Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?
Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius, and while some went cross-country skiing, Juan Aguilera, a set theorist at the Vienna University of Technology, preferred to linger in the cafeteria, tearing pieces of pulla pastry and debating… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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26
days ago
How AI Models Are Helping to Understand and Control the Brain
For Martin Schrimpf, the promise of artificial intelligence is not in the tasks it can accomplish. It’s in what AI might reveal about human intelligence. He is working to build a “digital twin” of the brain using artificial neural networks — AI models loosely inspired by how neurons communicate with one another. That end goal sounds almost ludicrously grand, but his approach is straightforward. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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28
days ago
The Ecosystem Dynamics That Can Make or Break an Invasion
For decades, ecologists have puzzled over a mystery: Why do some natural habitats get overrun by invasive species while others seem to repel outside threats? In a classic 1958 book on the subject, the ecologist Charles Elton argued that an ecosystem with more species should be more resilient. In a diverse ecosystem, he wrote, so many species are already divvying up the available resources that… Source
