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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.
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Lucy Reading-Ikkanda / Quanta Magazine Why Does the Universe Need to Be So Empty?
Physicists have long grappled with the perplexingly small weight of empty space.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine Physicists Found a Trick to Solve an ‘Impossible’ Puzzle of Gravity
The experiment would confirm that gravity is a quantum force.
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Sin Eater / Quanta Does a Spider Use Its Web Like You Use Your Smartphone?
The debate over whether an arachnid’s web is actually a part of its mind
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine Why Does Heat Kill Cells?
The answer to a longstanding mystery suggests that proteins are far more malleable than previously thought.
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Ashley Mackenzie / Quanta The Mysterious Origin of Our Galaxy’s Gold
After long believing that exploding stars forged the coveted metal, researchers are now divided over which extraordinary cosmic event is truly responsible.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine The Universe Is as Spooky as Einstein Thought
In a brilliant new experiment, physicists have confirmed one of the most mysterious laws of the cosmos.
