Quanta Magazine | Science and Math News
Dave Whyte for Quanta Magazine
Latest Articles
To Pack Spheres Tightly, Mathematicians Throw Them at Random
Four mathematicians broke a 75-year-old record by finding a denser way to pack high-dimensional spheres.
How a NASA Probe Solved a Scorching Solar Mystery
The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity.
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?
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.
Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare
A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness.
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.
Special Features
Quanta Podcast
The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new questions about memory, attention and mathematics.
Recommended Features
Puzzle
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.