Archive

To tame urban traffic, the computer scientist Carlos Gershenson finds that letting transportation systems adapt and self-organize often works better than trying to predict and control them.

The medical research scientist and Quanta puzzle columnist Pradeep Mutalik explores how to make sense of COVID-19 data while managing your personal risk.

New research finds that the subjective experience of time is linked to learning, thwarted expectations and neural fatigue.

It was an old idea of Stephen Hawking’s: Unseen “primordial” black holes might be the hidden dark matter. A new series of studies has shown how the theory can work.

Despite recent progress on the notorious Collatz conjecture, we still don’t know whether a number can escape its infinite loop.

Computer scientists are trying to build an AI system that can win a gold medal at the world’s premier math competition.

Renormalization has become perhaps the single most important advance in theoretical physics in 50 years.

Two computer scientists found — in the unlikeliest of places — just the idea they needed to make a big leap in graph theory.

A novel form of immunological memory that was mostly ignored for a century extends the benefits of vaccines. It could be of help in ending the COVID-19 pandemic.