We care about your data, and we'd like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.
Quanta Homepage
  • Physics
  • Mathematics
  • Biology
  • Computer Science
  • Topics
  • Archive

What's up in

Abstractions blog

Latest Articles

Photo of Escherichia coli under a microscope
Abstractions blog

Swarming Bacteria Create an ‘Impossible’ Superfluid

By Charlie Wood
July 26, 2018
Comment
Read Later

Researchers explore a loophole that extracts useful energy from a fluid’s seemingly random motion. The secret? Sugar and asymmetry.

Abstractions blog

How Artificial Intelligence Can Supercharge the Search for New Particles

By Charlie Wood
July 23, 2018
Comment
Read Later

In the hunt for new fundamental particles, physicists have always had to make assumptions about how the particles will behave. New machine learning algorithms don’t.

Abstractions blog

Why Nature Prefers Couples, Even for Yeast

By Jordana Cepelewicz
July 17, 2018
Comment
Read Later

Some species have the equivalent of many more than two sexes, but most do not. A new model suggests the reason depends on how often they mate.

Diagram showing show the hierarchy of different classes.
Abstractions blog

A Short Guide to Hard Problems

By Kevin Hartnett
July 16, 2018
Comment
Read Later

What’s easy for a computer to do, and what’s almost impossible? Those questions form the core of computational complexity. We present a map of the landscape.

Photo of the sun
Abstractions blog

What Is the Sun Made Of and When Will It Die?

By Natalie Wolchover
July 5, 2018
Comment
Read Later

If and when physicists are able to pin down the metal content of the sun, that number could upend much of what we thought we knew about the evolution and life span of stars.

Illustration for "Why Can’t We Find Planet Nine?"
Abstractions blog

Why Can’t We Find Planet Nine?

By Charlie Wood
July 3, 2018
Comment
Read Later

Astronomers suspect that there’s a large planet hiding out in the distant fringes of the solar system. At a recent workshop, they brainstormed ways to coax it into view.

Photo for "The Milky Way Once Collided With Another Galaxy"
Abstractions blog

The Young Milky Way Collided With a Dwarf Galaxy

By Ramin Skibba
June 28, 2018
Comment
Read Later

Astronomers have found stars dating from a long-ago collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy. The crash helps to explain why the Milky Way looks the way it does.

Photo of inside the MiniBooNE tank
Abstractions blog

Evidence Found for a New Fundamental Particle

By Natalie Wolchover
June 1, 2018
Comment
Read Later

An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted — a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino, though many physicists remain skeptical.

Photo of Emmanuelle Charpentier, Virginijus Šikšnys, Jennifer Doudna
Abstractions blog

CRISPR Gene-Editing Pioneers Win Kavli Prize for Nanoscience

By John Rennie
May 31, 2018
Comment
Read Later

The inventors of a “Swiss army knife” for genome editing received prestigious honors, as did pioneering scientists in astrophysics and neuroscience.


Previous
  • 1
  • ...
  • 40
  • 41
  • 42
  • 43
  • 44
  • 45
  • 46
  • ...
  • 55
Next
The Quanta Newsletter

Get highlights of the most important news delivered to your email inbox

Recent newsletters
Quanta Homepage
Facebook
Twitter
Youtube
Instagram
  • About Quanta
  • Archive
  • Contact Us
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy

All Rights Reserved © 2023
An editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation.