Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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3
hours ago
Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?
In 1992, mathematicians famously proved that seven “riffle shuffles” the kind where a player splits a deck of cards into two piles, then uses their thumbs to interleave them back together in a zipperlike motion are enough to mix up the deck. When Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis came up with this proof, they also revealed something surprising about what happens along the way: At first… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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2
days ago
How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
Every time I write about particle physics, I encounter a moment of uncertainty about a quantity that, at first glance, ought to be clear. How many kinds of elementary particles should I say there are? In experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, physicists smash together beams of protons, breaking them up into all possible elementary bits and pieces. Meanwhile, they have an incredibly accurate… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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5
days ago
Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself.
At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter thought to contain an ocean similar in some ways to one of our own. NASA engraved a metal plate affixed to the spacecraft with a poem, commissioned from Ada Limón during her time as poet laureate of the United States. It reads, in part: And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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6
days ago
What’s the Future of Gene Editing?
One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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7
days ago
An Early Step on the Long, Strange Road to Photosynthesis
Every second, trillions of watts of solar energy more than 10,000 times the energy used by modern humans blast the Earth’s surface. Around 2.4 billion years ago, life took an evolutionary leap when bacteria learned to harness these photons to break apart water molecules and stitch carbon atoms into sugars. Along the way, they flooded Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen and rewrote the rules of life. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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9
days ago
How Terry Tao Became an Evangelist for AI in Math
The following has been adapted from The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI by Kevin Hartnett. Terry Tao has never been afraid of unconventional ideas. In November 2014, he was on a panel of five distinguished mathematicians, all inaugural recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, which came with a $3 million award. The laureates’ conversation ranged… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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12
days ago
Are Memories Transferable or Edible?
I t was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century. To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman, needed some worms. Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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13
days ago
More Conversations, Complex Questions, and Bold Ideas in Season Five of ‘The Joy of Why’
What is the future of gene editing with CRISPR? Has AI changed mathematics forever? Will we find other civilizations in the universe? What if we’ve been wrong about dark energy all along? These are just a few of the big, bold questions we’ll be exploring in the new season of The Joy of Why. Mathematician Steven Strogatz and physicist Janna Levin are back as your hosts for these and other… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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14
days ago
Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now “Magic” Gives It Gravity.
In 1973, John Archibald Wheeler described the relationship between space and matter in two sentences: “Space acts on matter, telling it how to move. In turn, matter reacts back on space, telling it how to curve.” Wheeler’s words serve as a pithy encapsulation of general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. Wheeler’s sentences also lay out a challenge that theorists face today: When… Source
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16
days ago
The Dirt That Refused To Die
For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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19
days ago
Key Chemistry Question Answered, No Quantum Computer Required
What Garnet Chan cares most about is basic science. He entered chemistry decades ago to understand some of the most consequential biochemical processes on Earth. But since then, he’s become a central figure in a different arena: the debate over whether quantum computers will have a decisive advantage over ordinary “classical” ones. Over the past decade, many quantum computing researchers have… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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20
days ago
How We See the Beautiful, Violent Sun
The sun is one of the most studied objects in the history of science. The ancient Babylonians and Chinese tracked sunspots and solar eclipses, etching their observations into clay tablets; these records would outlast their civilizations. When the telescope arrived in the early 1600s, astronomers such as Galileo Galilei, Christoph Scheiner, and Johannes Fabricius turned these instruments toward… Source
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22
days ago
When Quiet Undersea Volcanoes Turn Disruptive
Jonas Preine, a recently minted Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg, squinted at a computer screen in the lab of a ship as it bobbed in the North Atlantic near Iceland. The image before him just didn’t make sense. It was June 2024, and Preine was among a crew of scientists who had set off from Reykjavik under slate-colored skies, trading their regular lives family, friends… Source
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27
days ago
How Ecotypes Harbor the Genetic Memory of a Species’ Past
When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly walked the shores of a Swedish archipelago, scanning the ground for pebbles that moved: marine snails. Her adviser, a taxonomist, had tasked her with describing the species present there by documenting their traits. She noticed that snails with thicker shells stayed on the shore… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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28
days ago
Two Researchers Are Rebuilding Mathematics From the Ground Up
Let’s start with what’s probably the most tired, overused joke in math: A topologist is someone who can’t tell a coffee cup from a doughnut. Both, you see, have a hole in them. Topology is usually described as a sort of “rubber sheet” geometry in which two shapes are considered the same if one can be stretched or compressed into the other without tearing it. But this summary leaves out something… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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28
days ago
How Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
What Albert Einstein was to 20th-century physics, Alexander Grothendieck was to 20th-century mathematics. He is much less well known because math gets technical even more quickly than physics does. But as with Einstein, Grothendieck’s impact came not just from his own results, revolutionary though they were. His work also reoriented his entire discipline in radical new directions. Source
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30
days ago
What Do Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems Truly Mean?
In 1931, by turning logic on itself, Kurt Gödel proved a pair of theorems that transformed the landscape of knowledge and truth. These “incompleteness theorems” established that no formal system of mathematics no finite set of rules, or axioms, from which everything is supposed to follow can ever be complete. There will always be true mathematical statements that don’t logically follow from… Source
