Latest Articles

My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine

April 12, 2024

Founding editor-in-chief Thomas Lin looks back at a decade of Quanta journalism and forward to what’s next for the magazine.

Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life

April 11, 2024

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community.

Can Information Escape a Black Hole?

April 11, 2024

Black holes are inescapable traps for most of what falls into them — but there can be exceptions. The theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind speaks with co-host Janna Levin about the black hole information paradox and how it has propelled modern physics.

Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award

April 10, 2024

The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.

Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound

April 9, 2024

Mathematicians have struggled to prove Falconer’s Conjecture, a simple, but far-reaching, hypothesis about the distances between points. They’re finally getting close.

How the Ancient Art of Eclipse Prediction Became an Exact Science

April 5, 2024

The timing of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024, will be known to within a second, thousands of years after fearful humans first started trying to anticipate these cosmic events.

Dark Energy May Be Weakening, Major Astrophysics Study Finds

April 4, 2024

A generation of physicists has referred to the dark energy that permeates the universe as “the cosmological constant.” Now the largest map of the cosmos to date hints that this mysterious energy has been changing over billions of years.

Overexposure Distorted the Science of Mirror Neurons

April 2, 2024

After a decade out of the spotlight, the brain cells once alleged to explain empathy, autism and theory of mind are being refined and redefined.

Merging Fields, Mathematicians Go the Distance on Old Problem

April 1, 2024

Mathematicians have illuminated what sets of points can look like if the distances between them are all whole numbers.

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