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P van Dokkum / NASA / AP Moving Stars Might Speed the Spread of Alien Life
Intelligent planet-hoppers could populate a galaxy in as little as 650,000 years.
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Todd Bretl Underwater Photography The Glowing Squid That Illuminates the Strangeness of Nature
The world is full of unexpected relationships.
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Alexandre Tamisier / Quanta A Hexagonal Theory of Memory
The same neural system could map both the physical and conceptual worlds.
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Simon Gingins / Courtesy of Quanta A Classic Test of Animals’ Minds Has a Fish Problem
An intelligent fish has stirred up a debate about how to measure self-awareness among animals—and what self-awareness even is in the first place.
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wavegrower What Keeps Black Holes From Expanding Everywhere?
Black holes are somehow able to grow constantly without changing their size. Physics might finally be able to explain why.
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Boris Vaudran A Break in the Quest for the Quantum Speed Limit
“When you see that, you know you’re touching on something very, very deep and fundamental.”
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Julia Gunther / Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine There May Be More Worlds With Water Than We Think
H2O is older than the sun, and could play a key role in helping planets grow.
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Niels Busch / Quanta Magazine An Experimental Boost for Quantum Weirdness
After a century of debate, an alternative theory that favored classical reality has finally met its ruin.
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Thibault Camus / AP Trees Could Change the Climate More Than Scientists Thought
A growing body of research suggests that models of the warming world have underestimated a crucial ingredient: vegetation.
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Ognen Teofilovski / Reuters Do or Die for the Leading Big Bang Theory
A new analysis could put the question of cosmic expansion to rest once and for all.
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Rune Fisker / Quanta Magazine When Shadows Are Not What They Seem
By picking up on patterns too subtle for humans to notice, non-line-of-sight imaging can see around corners and through walls.
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Maciej Rebisz / Quanta Magazine The Universe as We Understand It May Be Impossible
A new conjecture in physics challenges the leading “theory of everything.”
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NASA / JPL–Caltech / GSFC / JAXA Astronomers Can’t Decide What the Sun Is Made Of
The concentration of metals in our star will determine when it dies, but scientists struggle to settle on an estimate.
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Don Smith / Getty Earthquakes and Volcanoes May Have Helped Intelligent Life Evolve
Earth's slipping, sliding outer crust could be key to hosting a wide variety of living things.
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Photographer: Kiliii Yüyan / Art Director: Olena Shmahalo In the Garden of an Alien Hunter
When Victoria Meadows needs to ponder life on distant planets, she surrounds herself with earthly vegetation.
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Monica Almeida How a Pioneer of Machine Learning Became One of Its Sharpest Critics
Judea Pearl helped artificial intelligence gain a strong grasp on probability, but laments that it still can't compute cause and effect.
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ESA / Gaia / DPAC Galactic Archaeologists Begin Sifting Through Newly Illuminated Stars
The Milky Way's deep past is beginning to come into view.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine A Hidden Promise in the Language Cells Use to Communicate
Information and viruses spread through the body in surprisingly similar ways.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine Doubt Surrounds the Only Experiment That Claims to See Dark-Matter Particles
For two decades, one research team has detected collisions between dark and ordinary matter—but no one else can replicate their findings.
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Jessica Kourkounis / Quanta Magazine A Powerful New Weapon in the Fight Against Shoddy Statistics
Using the wrong method to analyze a data set can yield misleading results. So one researcher is championing an approach that works for nearly everything.
