Quanta
Articles republished from 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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Laura Lezza / Getty AI Keeps Mastering Games, But Can It Win in the Real World?
The challenges of moving bots off the chess board and into the mess of life
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Meredith Miotke / Quanta Magazine The Controversial Theory That Explains the Structure of the Internet
New evidence challenges one of the most celebrated ideas in network science.
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davidope / Quanta Magazine The Big Bang May Have Been One of Many
Our universe could be expanding and contracting eternally.
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Reuters Are Australians Redomesticating the Dingo?
A friendly group of the wild desert dogs could help tease apart domestication’s mysterious first steps.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine A Mission to Classify Even the Weirdest Phases of Matter
Physicists are looking far beyond solids, liquids, and gases.
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Eric Nyquist / Quanta Magazine How Far Should Life’s Genetic Alphabet Be Stretched?
With the technology to add new bases to DNA, scientists now have to figure out if it’s possible to improve on nature’s genetic code.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine The Best Explanation for Everything in the Universe
String theory is considered the leading “theory of everything,” but there’s still no empirical evidence for it.
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Allison Filice / Quanta Magazine Females' Eggs May Actively Select Certain Sperm
New evidence challenges the oldest law of genetics.
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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / CI Lab A New Way to Measure How Fast the Universe Is Expanding
Colliding neutron stars could settle the biggest debate in cosmology.
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Nikola Solic / Reuters The Lost History of Neanderthals
New genetic evidence suggests our mysterious ancient cousins were more resilient—and more humanlike—than previously thought.
