Anesthesia is very different from sleep — which is why it offers unique opportunities for studying the human brain, says the physician-researcher and statistician Emery Brown.
Philipp Ammon for Quanta Magazine
Q&A
How to Rewrite the Laws of Physics in the Language of Impossibility
Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.
immunology
A Backdoor Lets the Immune System Monitor the Brain
A newfound hub of immune system activity at the back of the brain solves a century-old puzzle.
astrophysics
Cosmic Map of Ultrahigh-Energy Particles Points to Long-Hidden Treasures
Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays twist and turn on their way to Earth, which has made it nearly impossible to identify the colossal monsters that create them.
graph theory
New Proof Reveals That Graphs With No Pentagons Are Fundamentally Different
Researchers have proved a special case of the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture, which shows what happens in graphs that exclude anything resembling a pentagon.
explainers
How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists
The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.
artificial intelligence
Latest Neural Nets Solve World’s Hardest Equations Faster Than Ever Before
Two new approaches allow deep neural networks to solve entire families of partial differential equations, making it easier to model complicated systems and to do so orders of magnitude faster.
neuroscience
The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations
Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.
Q&A
The New Historian of the Smash That Made the Himalayas
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.
Puzzle
More puzzles
Insights puzzle
The Puzzling Power of Simple Arithmetic
Playing with arithmetic can lead us to unexpected and profound discoveries that point toward deeper mathematics and sometimes even deeper science.
About Quanta Magazine
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.
