Anne Salomon’s first week as a graduate student in 2001 was not what she had anticipated. While other new students headed to introductory lectures, Salomon was whisked away by van and then motorboat to Tatoosh Island, which sits just offshore of the northwestern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Among the tide pools of this isolated island, Salomon peered at the web of life on the rocks... Source ..read more

String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a patch of space, the theory says, and you won’t see a menagerie of particles or jittery quantum fields. There will only be identical strands of energy, vibrating and merging and separating. By the late 1980s, physicists found that these “strings” can cavort in just a... Source ..read more

In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded... Source ..read more

What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it around and it becomes easier. The worst approach is almost always trial and error, which involves plugging in possible solutions until one works. But for some problems, it seems there simply are no... Source ..read more

At a conference in Japan a few years ago, David Dunsky attended a talk about gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time created when massive objects like stars and black holes accelerate. Dunsky was a graduate student in particle physics at the time, and his interests seemingly lay elsewhere. Particle physicists seek the more fundamental truth underpinning the physical rules we’re... Source ..read more

In October, a Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The $5 billion mission is designed to find out if Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, can support life. But because Europa is constantly bombarded by intense radiation created by Jupiter’s magnetic field, the Clipper spacecraft can’t orbit the moon itself. Instead... Source ..read more

For all their brilliance, artificial neural networks remain as inscrutable as ever. As these networks get bigger, their abilities explode, but deciphering their inner workings has always been near impossible. Researchers are constantly looking for any insights they can find into these models. A few years ago, they discovered a new one. In January 2022, researchers at OpenAI... Source ..read more

Dear Readers, Last July, I read this memo to the staff and explained why I had made the difficult decision to move on from my role as Quanta’s editor-in-chief. This magazine has meant everything to me since I pitched the concept to the Simons Foundation in 2012. Building, growing, nurturing and leading the publication and staff — and being a part of what we’ve collectively accomplished — has been... Source ..read more

Ever since viruses came to light in the late 1800s, scientists have set them apart from the rest of life. Viruses were far smaller than cells, and inside their protein shells they carried little more than genes. They could not grow, copy their own genes or do much of anything. Researchers assumed that each virus was a solitary particle drifting alone through the world, able to replicate only if it... Source ..read more

Nothing escapes a black hole … or does it? In the 1970s, the physicist Stephen Hawking described a subtle process by which black holes can “evaporate,” with some particles evading gravitational oblivion. That phenomenon, now dubbed Hawking radiation, seems at odds with general relativity, and it raises an even weirder question: If particles can escape, do they preserve any information about the... Source ..read more