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Pencils Down Playlist
Pencils Down: Mike Zitolo of School of the Future
Michael Zitolo is turning the way science is approached in the classroom upside down.
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Helen Quinn: A Wormhole Between Physics and Education
Pencils Down: Mike Zitolo of School of the Future
Pencils Down: Soni Midha of East Side Community High School
Pencils Down: Channa Comer of Baychester Middle School
Pencils Down: Aaron Mathieu of Acton-Boxborough Regional High School
Pencils Down: Channa Comer Teaching About Scientific Controls
Pencils Down: The Art of Teaching Math and Science
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Understanding Cryptography With These Five Worlds
Russell Impagliazzo describes the five possible cryptographic worlds we might inhabit.
Why Is This Basic Computer Science Problem So Hard?
Computer scientists have long used vector addition systems to model how certain programs work, but they didn’t have a full understanding of how complicated they could be. Recent work has finally pinned it down, showing that these problems are far more complicated than they seem.
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.
Decoding Math’s Most Famous Fractal
Mathematicians working in the field of complex dynamical systems are patiently unraveling the Mandelbrot set’s mysteries and may be on the verge of solving a fundamental conjecture that would allow them to describe the set completely.
The Math Hiding in Plain Sight
Sarah Hart, the professor of geometry at Gresham College, sees symmetry everywhere.
2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Math
In 2023, mathematicians improved bounds on Ramsey numbers, a central measure of order in graphs; found a new aperiodic monotile; and discovered a new upper bound to the size of sets without 3-term arithmetic progressions.
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.