Pure Science

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Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its...

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The passage of the sun across the sky — dawn, day, dusk, night — drives the clock of life. Some species wake with the sun and sleep with the moon. Others do the opposite, and a few keep odd hours. These naturally driven, 24-hour biological...

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One afternoon in October 1979, Gilles Brassard was swimming outside a beachfront hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when a stranger swam up to him and changed the course of his career. Without so much as an introduction, the man began...

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No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by. Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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“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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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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

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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...

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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....

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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...

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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...

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If you were asked to picture how electrons move, you could be forgiven for imagining a stream of particles sluicing down a wire like water rushing through a pipe. After all, we often describe electrons as “flowing” in an “electric...

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Real estate agents will tell you that a home’s most important feature is “location, location, location.” It’s similar in neuroscience: “Location is everything in the brain,” said Bosiljka Tasic, a self-described “biological cartographer.”...

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The trajectory of a storm, the evolution of stock prices, the spread of disease — mathematicians can describe any phenomenon that changes in time or space using what are known as partial differential equations. But there’s a problem: These...

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When you slip a slide under a microscope, a system of glass lenses magnifies the object of your attention — a microbe, for example. But even with the largest zoom on a classic compound optical system, scientists struggle to make sense of...

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In early 2007, René Hudec was in Building D of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, thumbing through roomfuls of floor-to-ceiling cabinets that look more like a vast record collection than an academic archive. Each paper sleeve...

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The human brain is a vast network of billions of neurons. By exchanging signals to depress or excite each other, they generate patterns that ripple across the brain up to 1,000 times per second. For more than a century, that dizzyingly...

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Two centuries ago, Joseph Fourier gave mathematicians a magical technique. He conjectured that it’s possible to write almost any function as a sum of simple waves, a trick now called the Fourier transform. These days, the Fourier transform...

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In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs bosons imbues other elementary particles...

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Nearly three years ago, a particle from space slammed into the Mediterranean Sea and lit up the partially complete Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (KM3NET) detector off the coast of Sicily. The particle was a neutrino, a fundamental...

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On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, six closely watched bats took to the star-draped skies. As they flew across the seven-acre speck of land, devices implanted in their brains pinged data back to a group of sleepy-eyed neuroscientists...

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Imagine if our skies were always filled with a thick layer of opaque clouds. With no way to see the stars, or to view our planet from above, would we have ever discovered that the Earth is round? The answer is yes. By measuring particular...

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Just as there’s no single best way to organize your bookshelf, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to storing information. Consider the simple situation where you create a new digital file. Your computer needs to rapidly find a place to...

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In 1998, astronomers discovered dark energy. The finding, which transformed our conception of the cosmos, came with a little-known consequence: It threw a wrench into the already daunting task of finding a version of string theory that...

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We’re used to thinking of the brain as an electric organ. The rest of the body? Not so much. But it would be a mistake to dismiss your other tissues as dumb hunks of electrically inert flesh. Even the protective layers of cells that...

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Nearly 200 years ago, the physicists Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes put the finishing touches on a set of equations that describe how fluids swirl. And for nearly 200 years, the Navier-Stokes equations have served as an...

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Read a story about dogs, and you may remember it the next time you see one bounding through a park. That’s only possible because you have a unified concept of “dog” that isn’t tied to words or images alone. Bulldog or border collie,...

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Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly empty it. You remove all its visible contents, pump out any gases, and — applying some science-fiction technology — evacuate any unseeable material such as dark matter. According to quantum...

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The standard sperm-meets-egg story posits that sperm cells are hardly more than bundles of shrink-wrapped DNA with tails. Their mission is simple: Deliver a father’s genes into a mother’s egg for sexual reproduction. Just about all other...

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Mathematics is, at its core, an art. Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create and explore new worlds. They test, and then push past, the limits of their imagination. They engage with thousands of years of history, with...

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It in no way reflects my feelings toward Quanta staff writer Charlie Wood that my favorite moment of the year in physics happened when he got seasick this summer aboard a ferry full of physicists on the North Sea. Charlie and hundreds of...

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Space and time aren’t just woven into the background fabric of the universe. To theoretical computer scientists, time and space (also known as memory) are the two fundamental resources of computation. Algorithms require a roughly...

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As I reflect on a year of Quanta biology stories to decide which of the many excellent ones to recommend, I am relying on memory. But what exactly does that mean? “Memory” is a slippery word. It means one thing to a person striving to...

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In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in algebraic geometry — using entirely alien techniques. It instantly captivated the field, stoking excitement in some mathematicians and skepticism in...

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Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help with that.” But users have long played a cat-and-mouse game to try to trick language models into providing forbidden information. These “jailbreaks” have run...

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The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this lubricating, liquidlike layer is what makes ice...

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Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can be hard to fully accept that fluent writing can come from an unthinking machine. That’s because, to many of us, finding the right words is a crucial...

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In mathematics, ubiquitous objects called groups display nearly magical powers. Though they’re defined by just a few rules, groups help illuminate an astonishing range of mysteries. They can tell you which polynomial equations are...

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When it comes to hard problems, computer scientists seem to be stuck. Consider, for example, the notorious problem of finding the shortest round-trip route that passes through every city on a map exactly once. All known methods for solving...

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Ninety million times a year, when protons crash together at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they produce, in their wreckage, a top quark and an anti-top quark, the heaviest known elementary particles. In the trillionth of a trillionth of...

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Life’s fundamental structure is the cell, and so the main things that a cell does — processing biomolecules, growing, replicating its genetic material and producing a new body — are considered hallmarks of life. But earlier this year,...

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All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in general, research mathematicians don’t need to think about it when they’re solving their problems....

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Tinkering at their desks with the mathematics of quantum space and time, physicists have discovered a puzzling conundrum. The arcane rules of quantum theory and gravity let them imagine many different kinds of universes in precise detail,...

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The force we experience most intimately remains the most mysterious. Physicists understand how vast migrations of particles called photons light up our homes, and how swarms of “gluon” particles hold together the cores of our atoms. But...