Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine
Studies suggest that epigenetics allows some learned adaptive responses to be passed down to new generations. The question is how.
Two monumental works have led many mathematicians to avoid the equal sign. The process has not always gone smoothly.
Cells in symbiotic partnership, sometimes nested one within the other and functioning like organelles, can borrow from their host’s genes to complete their own metabolic pathways.
Researchers finally seem to have a quantum computer that can outperform a classical computer. But what does that really mean?
The twin primes conjecture is one of the most important and difficult questions in mathematics. Two mathematicians have solved a parallel version of the problem for small number systems.
Fifty years after the current internet was born, the physicist and computer scientist Stephanie Wehner is planning and designing the next internet — a quantum one.
A brain circuit that suppresses distracting sensory information holds important clues about attention and other cognitive processes.
The way you learned to multiply works, but computers employ a faster algorithm.
Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior.
Simple physical principles can be used to describe how rivers grow everywhere from Florida to Mars.
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.
