Latest Articles
How a New X-Ray Technique Sees Black Holes
Astrophysicist Erin Kara explores black holes by carefully tracking the gas and plasma swirling near their event horizons.
The Math Hiding in Plain Sight
Sarah Hart, the professor of geometry at Gresham College, sees symmetry everywhere.
2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics
In 2023, physicists found the gravitational wave background that’s made by supermassive black hole collisions, teleported quantum energy in the lab, and puzzled over JWST’s potentially cosmology-breaking discoveries.
2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Computer Science
In 2023, computer scientists made progress on a new vector-driven approach to AI, fundamentally improved Shor’s algorithm for factoring large numbers, and examined the surprising and powerful behaviors that can emerge from large language models.
2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Biology and Neuroscience
During 2023, Quanta turned a spotlight on important research progress into the nature of consciousness, the origins of our microbiomes and the timekeeping mechanisms that govern our lives and development, among many other discoveries.
How AI Learns to ‘See’
Alexei Efros describes how he combines massive online data sets with machine learning algorithms to understand, model and re-create the visual world.
When Computers Write Proofs, What’s the Point of Mathematicians?
Andrew Granville muses on how artificial intelligence could profoundly change math.
Wormhole in the Lab
Wormholes were first envisioned almost a century ago, but it would take a number of theoretical leaps and a “crazy” team of experimentalists to build one on a quantum computer.