Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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4
hours ago
Is There Anything Left in the Dream of Cold Fusion?
Cold fusion: Now there’s an idea I hadn’t thought about in a while. It came back onto my radar in spring 2026. I had written an article on how scientists tend to be risk averse, and Huw Price, a philosopher at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, responded to it on Bluesky, citing a paper he’d recently co-authored on attitudes toward cold fusion. He thinks scientists have been overly… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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3
days ago
Is There More to Cold Fusion Than Failure and Fraud?
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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3
days ago
A New Map of ‘Empty’ Space Challenges a Tranquil Picture of the Galaxy
You might imagine space to be empty. But the seeming void contains a barely perceptible fog of hydrogen and other neutral atoms. In 2020, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, having passed the orbit of Pluto, measured a proxy for the amount of hydrogen around it. In the area between stars in our galaxy the “interstellar medium,” or ISM New Horizons found around 130 hydrogen atoms per liter of space. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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4
days ago
How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole?
Black holes are one of the universe’s most exotic and elusive objects. When nothing, not even light, can escape their powerful gravitational grasp, taking a picture of one seems unimaginable. But an image of a black hole, or more accurately its shadow, could offer insights that theory alone may not provide when testing predictions. So how can it be done? Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman and… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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5
days ago
How Spiders Spin ‘Silk Dope’ Into Nature’s Toughest Material
A spider, when knocked off a wall, doesn’t fall for long. Within milliseconds, it spins a soup of proteins into sturdy climbing gear. Using a thin, shimmering strand of silk, the spider hauls itself back up. The strand is tougher than Kevlar, the synthetic fiber in bike tires and bulletproof vests, and stronger than steel. It’s flexible and biocompatible with human bodies. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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7
days ago
How Voting Is Like a Klein Bottle
Mathematically speaking, democracy is next to impossible. That may sound like the premise of a Silicon Valley billionaire’s six-hour podcast, but it’s actually a statement about a remarkably stubborn problem: How do you translate a group of individual preferences into a single choice? In 1785, the French mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet discovered that a majority can… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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10
days ago
Malaria Parasite Caught in the Act of Breaking and Entering
In medieval Italy, it was accepted wisdom that anyone walking near a swamp risked falling ill from “bad air” mala aria. Victims were struck with fever, headache, nausea, and chills, and occasionally the illness escalated to vomiting, jaundice, and death. Today, we still call this affliction malaria. For much of human history, it has ravaged populations in humid tropical and subtropical regions… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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12
days ago
See Inside Cells Like Never Before in These Vivid Microscopic Images
On a frigid February morning in Edinburgh, Scotland, Patrick Hickey had run out of living things to put under his microscope. The plants and fungi in his garden had dried up, and summer puddles, with their flamboyant biological complexity, had long frozen over. Hickey, a mycologist at Hypha Research Ltd., was using plant leaves to study mitochondria, cellular organelles that generate energy. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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14
days ago
AI Proved the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis. What Happens Now?
Among the 377 results that OpenAI announced on October 6, 2026, one stood out. It claimed to settle the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” a weaker version of the Riemann hypothesis, which is arguably the biggest open question in math. The new proof is, as Jared Duker Lichtman of Stanford University put it, “the most significant AI-for-math achievement so far, by quite a margin. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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17
days ago
He Wants AI Benchmarking To Be a Science, Not a Dark Art
Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work according to an extremely simple logic: If you want to know what an AI model can do, devise a standardized test to gauge it. But AI benchmarks can also dominate the behavior of the entire field. In 1987, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first benchmark on automatic speech-to-text… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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18
days ago
How Do Fungi Keep the Planet Healthy?
People may think of soil as just dirt, but it is anything but inert. Beneath your feet, a vast network of mycorrhizal fungi is hard at work, trading minerals with plant roots. This trading system helps enrich the soil, and it sequesters 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide each year roughly equivalent to one-third of the world’s fossil-fuel emissions. Scientists know that these fungi… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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19
days ago
Triplet of ‘Ghostly’ Galaxies Hints at What Dark Matter Is and Isn’t
About 65 million light-years from Earth, three galaxies don’t look quite right. They aren’t whirlpools bursting with light, but pallid objects dimly illuminated by a smattering of stars. “They have this ghostly appearance,” said Michael Keim, an astrophysicist at Yale University. And this isn’t even the weirdest thing about them. Dark matter is the invisible glue that keeps the largest… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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21
days ago
Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence?
Everything that’s swept the world since the 2022 release of ChatGPT “the AI economy”; data centers; chatbots acting as best friends, doctors, and mathematicians; talk of existential risk it all starts, in some sense, with an intern in a University of Montreal lab named Dzmitry Bahdanau. It was 2014. The 23-year-old Belarusian, who had been coding competitively since he was a kid but hadn’t… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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24
days ago
How Does Life Unfold? A Landscape Metaphor Comes Into Its Own.
By the middle of the 20th century, it had begun to seem that biology was almost solved. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explained how organisms change and adapt. The modern science of genetics showed how it works at the molecular scale. Genes governing the traits of organisms get passed down from parent to offspring, and random mutations create the variations from which… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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26
days ago
As AI Closed In on ‘Unique Games’ Proof, Researchers Raced to Beat the Machines
On the morning of September 11, 2026, Dor Minzer received a text message from a friend asking whether he was close to settling one of the most famous open questions in theoretical computer science. Minzer, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading expert on the “unique games” conjecture, initially thought it was a joke. Then more messages started coming in… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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28
days ago
Is AI the End of Math As We Know It?
Throughout the summer of 2026, there were plenty of signs of what was to come. Every week, it seemed, artificial intelligence models were offering proofs of decades-old mathematical conjectures. So what happened on September 8 shouldn’t have been a complete surprise. And yet to many it felt sudden, almost violent. OpenAI announced that its models had solved one of math’s most famous problems and… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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31
days ago
Sea Monkeys Show Scientists How To Rewrite a Rule of Turbulence
In the 1960s and ’70s, colorful comic book advertisements from the Transcience Corporation in New York City promised to mail anyone who sent cash, check, or money order a “bowlfull of happiness” in reality, a small paper envelope of freeze-dried eggs. Dropped into salt water, the eggs would produce brine shrimp, also known as sea monkeys. Brine shrimp are about a centimeter long and swim… Source
