The Best of Quanta Magazine
20+ most popular Quanta Magazine articles, as voted by our community.
Big ideas in science and math. Because you want to know more. Launched by @SimonsFdn. 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. http://quantamagazine.org
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These are currently making the rounds on Refind.
What Causes Alzheimer’s? Scientists Are Rethinking the Answer.
After decades in the shadow of the reigning model for Alzheimer’s disease, alternative explanations are finally getting the attention they deserve.
The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think
Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease.
What Does It Mean to Align AI With Human Values?
Making sure our machines understand the intent behind our instructions is an important problem that requires understanding intelligence itself.
The Physics Principle That Inspired Modern AI Art
Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes ink to spread through water.
Ants Live 10 Times Longer by Altering Their Insulin Responses
Queen ants live far longer than genetically identical workers. Researchers are learning what their longevity secrets could mean for aging in other species.
Quanta Magazine on Biology
Animals Can Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?
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.
How Animals Color Themselves With Nanoscale Structures
Animals sculpt the optical properties of their tissues at the nanoscale to give themselves “structural colors.” New work is piecing together how they do it.
Quanta Magazine on Brain
Scientists Watch a Memory Form in a Living Brain
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.»
Self-Taught AI Shows Similarities to How the Brain Works
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.
Quanta Magazine on Computers
Common Sense Comes to Computers
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…
Computers Evolve a New Path Toward Human Intelligence
By ignoring their goals, evolutionary algorithms have solved longstanding challenges in artificial intelligence.
Quanta Magazine on Computer Science
The Biggest Discoveries in Computer Science in 2022
Computer scientists this year learned how to transmit perfect secrets, why transformers seem so good at everything, and how to improve on decades-old algorithms (with a little help from AI).
The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories
For pioneering computer scientist Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression.
Quanta Magazine on Cryptography
Which Computational Universe Do We Live In?
Cryptographers want to know which of five possible worlds we inhabit, which will reveal whether truly secure cryptography is even possible.
Researchers Identify ‘Master Problem’ Underlying All Cryptography
The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity.
Quanta Magazine on Math
In Mathematics, It Often Takes a Good Map to Find Answers
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.”»
Computing Expert Says Programmers Need More Math
Leslie Lamport revolutionized how computers talk to each other. Now he’s working on how engineers talk to their machines.
Quanta Magazine on Physics
How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything
The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum.
Computer Science Proof Lifts Limits on Quantum Entanglement
Three computer scientists have solved the NLTS conjecture, proving that systems of entangled particles can remain difficult to analyze even away from extremes.
Quanta Magazine on Quantum Computing
Cryptography’s Future Will Be Quantum-Safe. Here’s How It Will Work.
Lattice cryptography promises to protect secrets from the attacks of far-future quantum computers.
Machine Learning Gets a Quantum Speedup
Two teams have shown how quantum approaches can solve problems faster than classical computers, bringing physics and computer science closer together.
Quanta Magazine on Quantum Physics
Physicists Rewrite a Quantum Rule That Clashes With Our Universe
The past and the future are tightly linked in conventional quantum mechanics. Perhaps too tightly. A tweak to the theory could let quantum possibilities increase as space expands.
Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer
The unprecedented experiment explores the possibility that space-time somehow emerges from quantum information, even as the work’s interpretation remains disputed.
Quanta Magazine on Space
How to Make the Universe Think for Us
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.
What Drives Galaxies? The Milky Way’s Black Hole May Be the Key.
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.
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Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From?
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.
The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses
Neuroscientists uncovered an energy-saving mode in vision-system neurons that works at the cost of being able to see fine-grained details.
How Big Is Infinity?
Of all the endless questions children and mathematicians have asked about infinity, one of the most fascinating has to do with its size.
The Map of Mathematics
Explore our surprisingly simple, absurdly ambitious and necessarily incomplete guide to the boundless mathematical universe.
The Secret Math Behind Mind-Reading Magic Tricks
Four puzzle solutions reveal different ways to divine someone’s hidden number with impossibly little information.
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