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The Quanta Podcast

Every Tuesday, editor in chief Samir Patel sits down with writers and editors to discuss our most thought-provoking stories in science and math. Audio editions of Quanta’s stories with Susan Valot will appear biweekly on Thursdays.

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A view of lightning storms from space

What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting.

An illustration of identical black holes moving along a conveyer belt in a factory.

Astrophysicists Find No ‘Hair’ on Black Holes

The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived

A photograph of ice cubes molded into different shapes—including a sphere, a snowflake, a diamond, and a dinosaur—scattered across a blue surface.

Physicists Discover the Most Complex Forms of Ice Yet

Stylized digital artwork illustrating the concept of knowledge distillation in artificial intelligence. A big futuristic machine representing a large teacher model beams streams of binary code downward into an open laptop below, symbolizing a smaller student model receiving knowledge.

How Distillation Makes AI Models Smaller and Cheaper

An illustration shows a knight kneeling behind a shield engraved with an image of a bacterium, with which he defends against an onslaught of viruses.

The Ancient Weapons Active in Your Immune System Today

What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?

Steam billows off a colorful hot spring.

The Cells That Breathe Two Ways

A collage with Gilles Brassard (left) and Charles Bennett.

Quantum Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award

Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?

A fish with numbers on the side floating in a fishtank in the ocean. Other fish swim by.

New Physics-Inspired Proof Probes the Borders of Disorder

Tangles of green and blue strands, representing different types of proteins, spill out over the edges of a circular channel.

Disorder Drives One of Nature’s Most Complex Machines

In Math, Rigor Is Vital. But Are Digitized Proofs Taking It Too Far?

Illustration of a man holding a laptop while standing in the middle of a complicated optics experiment. Green laser beams fly around every which way.

AI Comes Up With Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work.

An illustration showing a variety of humanoid robots, including Atlas, Digit, a science fiction robot, and a toy, along with floating stairs.

Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff?

How Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos