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 ...

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating ...

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

By proving a broader version of Hilbert’s famous 10th problem, two groups of mathematicians have expanded the realm of ...

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?

On December 17, 1962, Life International published a logic puzzle consisting of 15 sentences describing five houses on a street. Each sentence was a clue, such as “The Englishman lives in the red ...

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature. Most of life’s engines run on sunlight. Photons filter ...