Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles ...

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster ...

Shalma Wegsman is the spring 2025 writing fellow at Quanta Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in physics from New York University and is a co-host of the podcast Why This Universe?

Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights ...

DNA is often compared to a written language. The metaphor leaps out: Like letters of the alphabet, molecules (the nucleotide bases A, T, C and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) are ...

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature. Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more ...

What is the deepest level of reality? In this Quanta explainer, Vijay Balasubramanian, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, takes us on a journey through space-time to investigate what it’s ...