How Did Life Begin on Earth?

Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving, discusses how to bring out the joy, creativity and beauty in math.

Condensed matter physics is the most active field of contemporary physics and has yielded some of the biggest breakthroughs of the past century.  Now for the first time, Jie Shan and Fai Mak, a husband-and-wife team at Cornell University, have figured out a way to create artificial atoms in the lab, opening the door to a new era in research.

As an evolutionary biochemist at University College London, Nick Lane explores the deep mystery of how life evolved on Earth. His hypothesis that life started with primitive metabolic reactions in deep-sea hydrothermal vents illuminates the outsized role that energy may have played in shaping evolution.

Rutgers University mathematician Alex Kontorovich takes us on a journey through the continents of mathematics to learn about the awe-inspiring symmetries at the heart of the Langlands program.

Astrophysicists and data scientists on the Event Horizon Telescope team give the backstory behind their new image of Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole.

Leslie Lamport talks about the importance of programming instead of coding, how he developed distributed systems and his favorite algorithm.

Vijay Balasubramanian discusses the connections he sees between physics, computer science, neuroscience and literature and the humanities.

Steven Strogatz — the acclaimed mathematician and author — hosts the new Quanta Magazine podcast “The Joy of Why.” On March 18, 2022, he joined Quanta editor Thomas Lin for a Simons Foundation Presents conversation about teaching, writing and podcasting.

For years, a pair of scientists have studied how a simple multicellular animal called Trichoplax coordinates its complex behavior without neurons or muscles. Their work shows that mechanical interactions alone can explain how the organism moves, seeks food and reproduces.