The Quanta Podcast

Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size entities anchored to the core-mantle boundary might be involved.

After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is.

In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

After just a few months of work, a complete newcomer to the world of sphere packing has solved one of its biggest open problems.

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that enter your nose and the individual neurons that translate them into perception in your brain.

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color vision needed to see them.

Two new notions of infinity challenge a long-standing plan to define the mathematical universe.

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are both interested and skeptical.