The Best of Quanta Magazine

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.

Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians.

Eugenio Calabi, who died on September 25, conceived of novel geometric objects that later became fundamental to string theory.

Mathematical logic and the code of computer programs are, in an exact way, mirror images of each other.

To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic children’s stories.

Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

Plants ignore the most energy-rich part of sunlight because stability matters more than efficiency, according to a new model of photosynthesis.

The problem of common-sense reasoning has plagued the field of artificial intelligence for over 50 years. Now a new approach, borrowing from two disparate lines of thinking, has made important…

By ignoring their goals, evolutionary algorithms have solved longstanding challenges in artificial intelligence.

Harry Halpin wants our internet conversations to be more private. He’s helped create a new kind of network that might make it possible.

In a watershed moment for cryptography, computer scientists have proposed a solution to a fundamental problem called “program obfuscation.”…

Cryptographers want to know which of five possible worlds we inhabit, which will reveal whether truly secure cryptography is even possible.

The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity.

Mathematicians try to figure out when problems can be solved using current knowledge — and when they have to chart a new path instead.

«“I think one of the reasons we were stonewalled was not because we didn’t have the right techniques, but because the problem wasn’t put in the right conceptual framework,” McMullen said. “The changed question suggested the changed techniques.”»

Leslie Lamport revolutionized how computers talk to each other. Now he’s working on how engineers talk to their machines.

Three computer scientists have solved the NLTS conjecture, proving that systems of entangled particles can remain difficult to analyze even away from extremes.

Ana Caraiani and James Newton have extended an important result in number theory to the imaginary realm.

Solve these puzzle questions to level up your Wordle game.

In recreational mathematics, the balance scale is an endless source of puzzles that require precise and elaborate logic and teach the fundamentals of generalization.

The unprecedented experiment explores the possibility that space-time somehow emerges from quantum information, even as the work’s interpretation remains disputed.

Shor’s algorithm will enable future quantum computers to factor large numbers quickly, undermining many online security protocols. Now a researcher has shown how to do it even faster.

The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum.

Consciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven Strogatz, research is making progress in…

Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers, arguing that the future of computing lies in exploiting the universe’s complex physical behaviors.

Supermassive black holes have come to the fore as engines of galactic evolution, but new observations of the Milky Way and its central hole don’t yet hang together.

Einstein’s description of curved space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the quest for quantum gravity with host Steven Strogatz.

When the brain encodes memories as positive or negative, one molecule determines which way they will go.

Of all the endless questions children and mathematicians have asked about infinity, one of the most fascinating has to do with its size.

Self-supervised learning allows a neural network to figure out for itself what matters. The process might be what makes our own brains so successful.

While watching a fearful memory take shape in the brain of a living fish, neuroscientists see an unexpected level of rewiring occur in the synaptic connections.

«Neuroscientists generally agree that the brain forms memories by modifying its synapses — the tiny junctures where neurons meet. But most believe that it mainly does so by tweaking the strength of the connections, or how strongly one neuron stimulates the next, Fraser said.»