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A Portal to Mars on the Tip of Iceland
A volcano erupting on the island is a living replica of what once happened on Mars.
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Christian Vorhofer/ imageBROKER / Alamy The Arctic Has a Cloud Problem
Tiny iodine particles are clumping together to trap sunlight and melt polar sea ice.
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MARK GARLICK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / GETTY A New Era of Black Holes Is Here
Astronomers have discovered a black-hole treasure trove that is changing our view of the cosmos.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona Mars Doesn’t Look So Dead After All
New discoveries have raised the possibility that the planet’s volcanoes, long assumed dormant, may still be active.
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New York Public Library Where Are All the Tiny Black Holes?
The discovery of a celestial “unicorn” that’s just a slim 2.9 solar masses may help unravel a mystery that has long puzzled astronomers.
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Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner and the eSASS team … The 70-Year-Old Mystery of Two Galactic Mushroom Clouds
Giant bubbles hovering over the Milky Way seem to be remnants of an ancient explosion.
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Samuel Velasco / Quanta Magazine Survival of the Luckiest
Natural selection isn’t the only way species evolve.
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Computational Physics Inc. Life as We Know It Hinges on One Very Small Decimal
Give it up for 1/137.
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Sakkmesterke / Science Photo Library The Universe Might Be Too Thin
Scientists may have found a new crack in our understanding of the universe.
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Lars Lehnert / 500px / Getty Penguins Are Nature’s Best Snugglers
How they huddle is so mathematically perfect that mathematicians can’t design a better way themselves.
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Space Frontiers / Getty Continent-Size Pressure Waves Are Rippling Through Earth’s Atmosphere
Scientists first theorized about the waves 220 years ago. In June, they finally found solid evidence.
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Jenő Káldy / Quanta This Fish Should Not Exist
“It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.”
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NASA A Breakthrough Some Cosmologists Thought Would Never Come
A new theory of the universe’s structure might offer the most plausible alternative yet to dark matter.
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Usman Bashir How Loners Are an Evolutionary Insurance Policy
Organisms that don’t follow the herd may not be stragglers, but nature’s way of hedging its bets.
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Ave Calvar / Quanta The Last Place on Earth We’d Ever Expect to Find Life
Microbes are turning up deep beneath the ocean floor, a sign that life might have fewer limits than scientists once thought.
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Guillem Casasús Xercavins / Quanta The Easy Questions That Stump Computers
What happens when you stack logs in a fireplace and drop a match? Some of the smartest machines have no idea.
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Lukas Vojir / Quanta The Case of the Missing Bacteria
Microbes in our gut are key to staying healthy, but scientists are coming to realize that isn’t the case for all animals.
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Dave Whyte / Quanta Magazine What Einstein May Have Gotten Wrong
The Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin is using an old form of math to rethink the very basics of what we know about time.
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EGO / Virgo Collaboration / Perciballi / Quanta The Search for the Perfect Mirror
Your bedroom mirror does the trick in the morning, but for scientists studying gravitational waves, even the tiniest of imperfections can make a huge difference.
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Zoë van Dijk / Quanta Magazine An Unexpected Ally in the War With Bacteria
Scientists have struggled to develop new antibiotics. Enter: the machines.
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