-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
Maciej Rebisz / Quanta Magazine The Universe as We Understand It May Be Impossible
A new conjecture in physics challenges the leading “theory of everything.”
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
ESA / Gaia / DPAC Galactic Archaeologists Begin Sifting Through Newly Illuminated Stars
The Milky Way's deep past is beginning to come into view.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
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.
-
![]()
Caitlin Cunningham / Quanta Can Babies Understand the World From Birth?
There are surprising similarities between their brains and adults’.
-
![]()
Eric King / Quanta Explorers Find Passage to Earth's Dark Age
Geochemical signals from near the planet’s core are beginning to shed light on its first 50 million years, a period long viewed as inaccessible to science.
-
![]()
Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine The Biological Clock Hidden in Animals' Teeth
Stripes laid down by tooth enamel could reveal why big mammals grow slower—and live longer—than small ones.
-
![]()
Boya Sun / Quanta Magazine A New Way for Viruses to Hijack Cells
Many viruses thrive by blocking cells’ internal messages, but one particularly crippling infection can actually change these messages’ content.
