Quanta Magazine | Science and Math News
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Latest Articles
Does AI Know What an Apple Is? She Aims to Find Out.
The computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “meaning” into concrete, testable ideas.
Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’
More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems. Has the powerful metaphor lost its mathematical meaning?
AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities
Using machine learning, string theorists are finally showing how microscopic configurations of extra dimensions translate into sets of elementary particles — though not yet those of our universe.
Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions
Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes.
Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier
Researchers have shown how to find the simplest description of a data set faster than by simply checking every possibility.
Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft
Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade.
Pleasure or Pain? He Maps the Neural Circuits That Decide.
The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely how much pleasure and pain animals experience during different forms of touch.
Geometers Engineer New Tools to Wrangle Spacecraft Orbits
Mathematicians think abstract tools from a field called symplectic geometry might help with planning missions to far-off moons and planets.
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Quanta Podcast
The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new questions about memory, attention and mathematics.
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Illuminating basic science and math research through public service journalism.
More about usQuanta Magazine is committed to in-depth, accurate journalism that serves the public interest. Each article braids the complexities of science with the malleable art of storytelling and is meticulously reported, edited and fact-checked. Launched and funded by the Simons Foundation, Quanta is editorially independent — our articles do not reflect or represent the views of the foundation.