Quantitative models built by the mathematical biologist Trachette Jackson can make cancer therapies safer and more effective.
Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine
Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.
About 60 million years ago, India plowed into Eurasia and pushed up the Himalayas. But when Lucía Pérez-Díaz reconstructed the event in detail, she found that its central mystery depended on a broken geological clock.
Radio waves, longer and less energetic than visible light, give astronomers access to some of the most obscure physics in the cosmos.
Inside the symmetries of a crystal shape, a postdoctoral researcher has unearthed a counterexample to a basic conjecture about multiplicative inverses.
A patchwork of genomic differences in the placenta may explain the organ’s “live fast, die young” strategy and its connections to cancer.
Today’s long-anticipated announcement by Fermilab’s Muon g-2 team appears to solidify a tantalizing conflict between nature and theory. But a separate calculation, published at the same time, has clouded the picture.
Fifty years ago, Paul Erdős and two other mathematicians came up with a graph theory problem that they thought they might solve on the spot. A team of mathematicians has finally settled it.
Rediet Abebe uses the tools of theoretical computer science to understand pressing social problems — and try to fix them.
Quantitative models built by the mathematical biologist Trachette Jackson can make cancer therapies safer and more effective.
The human mind has long grappled with the elusive nature of time: what it is, how to record it, how it regulates life, and whether it exists as a fundamental building block of the universe.
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.
