Kouzou Sakai for Quanta Magazine
By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences.
Britta Späth has dedicated her career to proving a single, central conjecture. She’s finally succeeded, alongside her partner, Marc Cabanes.
Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to understand the implications.
A new proof reveals the answer to the decades-old “moving sofa” problem. It highlights how even the simplest optimization problems can have counterintuitive answers.
Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences.
Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights continue to shape physics.
By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.
By proving a broader version of Hilbert’s famous 10th problem, two groups of mathematicians have expanded the realm of mathematical unknowability.
Christopher W. Young/Quanta Magazine
These three imagined scenarios lead many physicists to doubt that space-time is fundamental.
The first planet beyond our solar system was identified just 30 years ago. Since then, thousands have been found and characterized. As we look for more, exoplanet experts are also probing for signs of alien biospheres hundreds of light-years away. In this episode, co-host Janna Levin speaks with astrophysicist and astrobiologist Lisa Kaltenegger about how we’ll know we’re not alone in the cosmos.
Illuminating basic science and math research through public service journalism.
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