Archive

Quanta’s new puzzle column asks you to believe the seemingly impossible — that you can win at a number guessing game with absolutely no information.

At super-low temperatures, a crystal called samarium hexaboride behaves in an unexplained, imagination-stretching way.

Scientists haven’t tested the Big Bang’s light for a revealing shift in 25 years. A new experiment aims to change that.

The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks.

By replacing black holes with fuzzballs — dense, star-like objects from string theory — researchers think they can avoid some knotty paradoxes at the edge of physics.

By swapping ancient genes into modern E. coli, scientists hope to tease out the rules of evolution.

The soil teems with billions of hidden microbes. Researchers have begun to catalog how these organisms are changing the world.

Solve this variation of Thomas Kirkman’s famous 1850 puzzle by arranging girls in walking groups. And think fast — the clock is ticking.

A 150-year-old conundrum about how to group people has been solved, but many puzzles remain.