Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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5
hours ago
Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff?
The last time I covered the science of humanoid robots, the state of the art looked downright Orwellian by which I mean, “four legs good, two legs bad.” It was 2015. Boston Dynamics’ first “Spot” quadruped had taken YouTube by storm, confidently trotting up stairs and recovering from vicious kicks. Also popular at the time: humanoids falling down. Constantly. I felt sorrier for those tottering… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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2
days ago
Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals
Astrid Eichhorn spends her days thinking about how the laws of physics change at the tiniest scales. Imagine zooming in closer and closer to the device on which you’re reading this article. Its apparently smooth screen quickly dissolves into a jiggling lattice of molecules, which in turn resolve into clouds of electrons buzzing around atomic nuclei. You dive into a nucleus… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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4
days ago
Disorder Drives One of Nature’s Most Complex Machines
At the dawn of complex life, evolution created a container for DNA, its most treasured item. A few billion years later, 20th-century microscopists looked at this container the nucleus up close and saw that it was covered in tiny openings. At the time, they didn’t know what to make of these structures, but as microscopy improved, something grand came into focus: what we now call “nuclear pore… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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7
days ago
New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem
Picture a bizarre training exercise: A group of runners starts jogging around a circular track, with each runner maintaining a unique, constant pace. Will every runner end up “lonely,” or relatively far from everyone else, at least once, no matter their speeds? Mathematicians conjecture that the answer is yes. The “lonely runner” problem might seem simple and inconsequential, but it crops up… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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9
days ago
Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place?
“I’ve spent a long time exploring the crystalline beauty of traditional mathematics, but now I’m feeling an urge to study something slightly more earthy,” John Baez wrote on his blog in 2011. An influential mathematical physicist who splits his time between the University of California, Riverside and the University of Edinburgh, Baez had grown increasingly concerned about the state of the planet… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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11
days ago
What Crystals Older Than the Sun Reveal About the Start of the Solar System
The standard story of the origin of our solar system has gone like this: 4.6 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust hung frozen in space. Then the explosion of a nearby star caused part of that dust cloud to collapse. Pulled by gravity toward a central point, the dust coalesced into a radiating ball of hydrogen and helium about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter what would become our sun. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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14
days ago
Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues and Organs
There’s a moment, just before the tight mass of cells that is a developing mouse embryo implants itself in the womb, that it all comes apart. Hundreds of tiny fluid-filled bubbles expand between each of the orb’s few dozen cells. The bubbles grow and press outward on cell membranes and then, in a moment of fracture, pry them apart. Thin protein stands tether the cells together as the… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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16
days ago
The Man Who Stole Infinity
When Demian Goos followed Karin Richter into her office on March 12 of last year, the first thing he noticed was the bust. It sat atop a tall pedestal in the corner of the room, depicting a bald, elderly gentleman with a stoic countenance. Goos saw no trace of the anxious, lonely man who had obsessed him for over a year. Instead, this was Georg Cantor as history saw him. An intellectual giant… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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18
days ago
How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes?
Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others. The post How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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21
days ago
Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds
In October 2008, Chris Bretherton lifted off from the coast of northern Chile in a C-130 turboprop plane. It was too dark to see the sandy hills of the Atacama Desert below, but the darkness suited Bretherton just fine. The researcher wasn’t going sightseeing. Seated directly behind the pilots, he kept his focus entirely on the sky. The plane was stuffed with instruments, and its wings bristled… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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23
days ago
The Biophysical World Inside a Jam-Packed Cell
It’s a familiar image, reprinted in countless biology textbooks: an illustration of a typical cell, halved like a grapefruit to reveal its innards. Strands of endoplasmic reticulum encircle a nucleus that floats in the center like a raft. RNA molecules wait patiently at ribosomes to deliver recipes for making proteins. A few vacuoles and Golgi bodies bob about. A mostly deserted cytosol offers a… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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24
days ago
A New Complexity Theory for the Quantum Age
Computer science, at its most fundamental, is all about inputs and outputs. Consider the simple case of multiplying two numbers on a pocket calculator. You punch in some inputs — the specific numbers you want to multiply — and the screen displays an output representing their product. The reverse problem of breaking a number into its prime factors can be much harder, but it has the same basic… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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28
days ago
Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning To Dissolve?
N one of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or that a mysterious process causes quantumness to spontaneously collapse. This unsatisfying state was a key element of Beyond… Source
