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Tech - Quanta Magazine - 5 hours ago

Corals Spin Tiny Vortices to Get Oxygen, but Not if It’s Too Hot

At first glance, corals present as little more than colorful rocks piles of lobes, stalagmites, and branches poking out from the seafloor. They are anything but. Corals are complex creatures that form enduring colonies, and just like other animals they need oxygen to live. Across the living surface of coral, a frantic dance of survival takes place, invisible to our eyes and unknown to science… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 2 days ago

Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI

On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model one not available to the public had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” problem, a conjecture made in 1946 by Paul Erdős, the prolific, itinerant Hungarian mathematician. Erdős posed thousands of questions, but this one was special: It was both simple to explain and… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 5 days ago

Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons?

I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI “reasoning”? Sorry for the air quotes. That punctuational side-eye was more common in 2024, when the specially trained cousins of LLMs now known as “large reasoning models,” or LRMs, were still new. Nowadays it may seem downright churlish, though, given that a “general-purpose reasoning model” from OpenAI solved a famous open mathematical… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 7 days ago

Physicists Solve a Big Quantum Mystery. Now, Old Results Don’t Add Up.

For 25 years, physicists have been puzzled by an apparent one-part-in-a-million problem. Their expectations of the way that certain particles should wobble in a magnetic field were clashing with what they saw in experiments. The discrepancy was an electrifying hint that they might be seeing evidence of unknown particles. Then in 2021, that hint seemed to evaporate. When researchers updated the… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 9 days ago

A New Way That a Cow’s Inner World Shapes Earth’s Atmosphere

Within every cow is a thriving ecosystem. Churning deep in its intestines, a massive fermentation chamber known as the rumen hosts a robust microbiome that can consume up to 100 pounds of feed daily. Inside this gut pouch, tens of millions of bacteria scavenge for scraps of fiber, starch, and other nutrients, and break down cellulose and proteins. They get a hand from microbial fungi… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 13 days ago

How Fast Is the Universe Really Expanding?

One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding, but in the 1990s, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating rather than slowing down came as a huge shock to the field. Something had to be driving that acceleration, and dark energy was proposed as the cause. What began as a seismic shock in… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 13 days ago

A Master of the Traveling Salesperson Problem Finds His Own Path

In theoretical computer science, the key to cracking tough problems is finding the right tools. Most researchers gravitate toward tools that match the problems they hope to solve, and some devote entire careers to mastering a few familiar techniques. But Shayan Oveis Gharan, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, has never been content with the familiar. Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 13 days ago

Living Fully in the Math World Means Threading the Needle

One might imagine that, for a mathematician, proving a monumental theorem is a blissful experience. It wasn’t so for Hong Wang. In February 2025, Wang and her collaborator Joshua Zahl presented a 127-page proof of a long-standing conjecture at the intersection of multiple branches of math. The duo had been checking their work for months and had sent it to select colleagues for review before… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 13 days ago

Sometimes Being First Means Seeing the End Before Anyone Else

Jacob Tsimerman knows that many people see mathematics as a search for beauty. Over the course of his career, he has encountered beauty many times. But beauty is not what drives him. What he loves most is to solve hard problems, and to be the first to do so. “In my experience, and I think many people’s experience, math is very much a goal-oriented endeavor,” he said. “The truth-and-beauty stuff… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 13 days ago

Fields and Abacus Medals 2026

Every four years, the math world’s preeminent awards are given to the finest minds of a generation. The young winners all under 40 on the first day of the year have reshaped mathematics and theoretical computer science. Here are their stories. The post Fields and Abacus Medals 2026 first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 13 days ago

The Quietest Mathematician Has Always Been Worth Listening To

Several eminent mathematicians tell different versions of the same story about John Pardon. Fifteen years ago, János Kollár was seated next to Pardon at a Phi Beta Kappa dinner. Kollár held an endowed chair as a full professor at Princeton University, where he’d been teaching for over a decade after stints at the University of Utah and at Harvard University as a member of its Society of Fellows… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 16 days ago

The Organisms That Make Earth’s Harshest Places Home

Life has scarcely found a boundary on Earth that it can’t push. While much of life’s diversity exists in lush, bountiful habitats like tropical rainforests and coral reefs, even the most brutal corners of the planet are also occupied. The organisms that thrive in extreme environments blistering temperatures, crushing pressures, corrosive acid are what we call “extremophiles. Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 19 days ago

Martin Picard’s Mitochondrial Theory of Mind

It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 21 days ago

Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow

In the quest to make computers accurate and reliable, noise is the enemy. The thermal jiggling of atoms is a constant threat to the precision needed for detailed calculations. Whether we’re dealing with familiar classical devices like the laptops or supercomputers that we use today, or fancy quantum devices that promise us faster computation tomorrow, we don’t want some haphazard heat fluctuation… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 23 days ago

Why Am I Left-Handed?

When I was first learning to write, my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror. Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters. I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write. I have a mirror-written childhood… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 26 days ago

We Know Simple Fluids Can Flow. Turns Out, Some Can Fracture.

Thamires Lima, a research professor in chemical engineering at Drexel University, studies the properties of thick, viscous liquids think honey or molasses, though in a lab you’re more likely to find polypropylene or crude oil. Using a method called extensional rheology, Lima stretches liquids between metal plates to find the force that makes them flow. A few years ago, she was conducting a… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 27 days ago

Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations?

Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated us for centuries, but despite decades of searching it remains frustratingly unanswered. Every so often a curious signal appears fossilized structures in a meteorite, say, or an unusual gas in an exoplanet’s atmosphere and for a moment it seems possible that we are not alone before the excitement gives way to a… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 28 days ago

Is Life Just Different?

In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft, which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence… Source

Tech - Quanta Magazine - 30 days ago

Researchers Reveal the Power of ‘Quantum Proofs’

More than 30 years ago, researchers discovered that hypothetical computers based on the laws of quantum physics would be able to rapidly solve difficult math problems. Ever since then, they’ve sought to pinpoint cases where quantum computers are more powerful than their ordinary “classical” cousins. For nearly as long, a small band of computer scientists has pursued a related question that gets… Source