Science and Math News | Quanta Magazine
Get the latest news delivered to your inbox. The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. Individual cells in the brain light …
The Year in Physics | Quanta Magazine
Dec 17, 2024 · Astronomical Discoveries. The night sky holds many secrets. The flagship of modern astronomy, the James Webb Space Telescope, beamed down a few more this year, particularly in its observations of faraway objects from the universe’s first billion years.Banana-shaped galaxies, little red dots, grape-like clusters, shockingly big young black holes: Astrophysicists are reveling in the ...
The Year in Biology | Quanta Magazine
Dec 18, 2024 · Biologists Meet the AI Revolution . In 2024, hardly a week could go by without some big new paper related to Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2: a neural network that can accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of a folded protein from the one-dimensional string of its amino acid molecules.In drug discovery, for example, biologists tested its ability to identify new drug targets and ...
What Is a Particle? - Quanta Magazine
Nov 12, 2020 · The picture soon got even stranger. In the 1930s, physicists realized that the wave functions of many individual photons collectively behave like a single wave propagating through conjoined electric and magnetic fields — exactly the classical picture of light discovered in the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell.
The Year in Math | Quanta Magazine
Dec 16, 2024 · I n May, a team of nine mathematicians announced a major breakthrough. They had proved what is called the geometric Langlands conjecture — a central component of a broader research program to build a “grand unified theory” of mathematics. The proof, which totaled more than 800 pages and marked the culmination of 30 years of work, was, in the words of one mathematician, a “crowning ...
How the Higgs Field (Actually) Gives Mass to Elementary Particles
Sep 3, 2024 · This notion lies at the heart of what the late British physicist Peter Higgs, namesake of the Higgs field, and his competitors pointed out in the 1960s: that one field can stiffen other fields, thereby permitting their ripples to vibrate in place with a resonant frequency, and thus giving their particles mass.
Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold
Dec 9, 2024 · Quanta Magazine moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected.
What Is Quantum Teleportation? - Quanta Magazine
Mar 14, 2024 · Teleporting people through space is still science fiction. But quantum teleportation is dramatically different and entirely real. In this episode, Janna Levin interviews the theoretical physicist John Preskill about teleporting bits and the promise of quantum technology.
Physics News, Interviews and Columns | Quanta Magazine
Quanta’s award-winning coverage of astrophysics, cosmology, quantum physics, geophysics, condensed matter, statistical mechanics, chaos theory, climate science and more.
Mathematicians Uncover a New Way to Count Prime Numbers
Dec 11, 2024 · This last constraint has been particularly useful, guiding centuries of mathematical progress. In 1640, Pierre de Fermat conjectured that there are infinitely many primes that can be formulated by squaring two whole numbers and adding them together.