Pencils Down

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia is now revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.

The year’s biggest computer science stories included a new understanding of large language models, and a breakthrough in being able to compute complex quantum systems.

We look back at three of the biggest biology stories of 2024: a reconstruction of the ancient ancestor of all modern life, the discovery of a neural circuit that regulates the immune system, and artificial intelligence’s transformation of protein science.

A look back at three of the biggest stories in physics this year, including evidence that dark energy may be weakening, the discovery of a supersolid, and new advances in quantum geometry.

We investigate three of 2024’s biggest breakthroughs in mathematics, including a better way to pack spheres in high dimensions, a new way to avoid forming patterns of numbers, and an 800-page proof of the so-called geometric Langlands conjecture.

This is the inside story of how David Baker (pictured here), Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for advances in computer-assisted protein design and structure prediction.

What is the deepest level of reality? In this Quanta explainer, Vijay Balasubramanian, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, takes us on a journey through space-time to investigate what it’s made of, why it’s failing us, and where physics can go next.

The physicist Alex Sushkov has developed one of the most targeted magnetic resonance experiments to date with the aim of detecting a hypothetical dark matter particle called the axion.

Brown University computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “understanding” and “meaning” into concrete ideas that are testable on LLMs.