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Latest Articles

The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus

Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ready to study dark matter and dark energy in unprecedented detail.

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Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies

An attack on a fundamental proof technique reveals a glaring security issue for blockchains and other digital encryption schemes.

New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source

After just a few months of work, a complete newcomer to the world of sphere packing has solved one of its biggest open problems.

How Smell Guides Our Inner World

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that enter your nose and the individual neurons that translate them into perception in your brain.

Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.

A robotic arm paints on a canvas set on an easel, surrounded by paint buckets and abstract artworks in a minimal, blue-toned room. Splashes of paint scatter on the floor, blending mechanical precision with artistic expression.

When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color?

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color vision needed to see them.

A New Pyramid-Like Shape Always Lands the Same Side Up

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture.

Matter vs. Force: Why There Are Exactly Two Types of Particles

Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories. Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.

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Mirror Molecules: The Symmetry Rule Life Never Breaks

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Special Features

Quanta Podcast


Is Gravity Just Entropy Rising? Long-Shot Idea Gets Another Look.

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are both interested and skeptical.

00:00 / 29:13

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How Can AI ID a Cat? An Illustrated Guide.

Neural networks power today’s AI boom. To understand them, all we need is a map, a cat and a few thousand dimensions.

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Illuminating basic science and math research through public service journalism.

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Quanta 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.

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