Cody O’Loughlin for Quanta Magazine
Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can’t be overcome with good design alone.
After millions of games, machine learning algorithms found creative solutions and unexpected new strategies that could transfer to the real world.
Taste and smell receptors in unexpected organs monitor the state of the body’s natural microbial health and raise an alarm over invading parasites.
Three physicists stumbled across an unexpected relationship between some of the most ubiquitous objects in math.
How a young celebrity became one of the first female astronomers at Caltech, befriended Richard Feynman, and ended up the world’s foremost chronicler of the science of the night sky.
Activity in the visual cortex and other sensory areas is dominated by signals about body movements, down to little tics and twitches. Scientists are now rethinking how they study and conceive of perception.
By ignoring their goals, evolutionary algorithms have solved longstanding challenges in artificial intelligence.
Looking for answers in infinite space is hard. High school math can help narrow your search.
In a Paris lab, researchers have shown for the first time that quantum methods of transmitting information are superior to classical ones.
Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior.
In the late 1940s, Richard Feynman invented a visual tool for simplifying particle calculations that forever changed theoretical physics.
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.
