Quanta Magazine

At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the uncertainty principle, which says that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can know about how fast it's moving, and vice versa. Recently,

A river has my heart. It's not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in Texas. My maternal ancestors have dipped into its waters for genera

In a laboratory 2 kilometers underground, a crane lowers Matt Depatie, a detector technologist, through a hatch into a white-walled cavern filled with about 7,000 tons of ultrapure water that glows as blue as wiper fluid in the light. "Splashdown," Depati

Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, however they are anything but that. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, or why a loved one's touch soothes while a stranger's touch repels. To

At first glance, corals present as little more than colorful rocks - piles of lobes, stalagmites, and branches poking out from the seafloor. They are anything but. Corals are complex creatures that form enduring colonies, and just like other animals they

AI's greatest mathematical successes have come from answers to problems posed by a mid-20th century iconoclast. By examining what makes the Erdős problems unique, mathematicians are trying to understand how AI might change the rest of math.

The idea that artificial intelligence can

New calculations seem to have put a 25-year-old particle physics puzzle to rest. But they've also created a clash with other experimental results.

An organelle discovered inside a microbe inside a cow's gut helps explain how livestock burps contribute to warming our planet.