Quanta Magazineflipped into Computer ScienceComputer Science Machines’ Language Skills Just Surpassed Our Own. But Is This Understanding?Quanta Magazine - John Pavlus A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. In a sense, this means that artificial intelligence has solved …
Quanta Magazineflipped into BiologyInheritance Inherited Learning? It Happens, but How Is UncertainQuanta Magazine - Viviane Callier Studies suggest that epigenetics allows some learned adaptive responses to be passed down to new generations. The question is how. Rechavi says that …
Quanta Magazineflipped into PhysicsScience How the Neutrino’s Tiny Mass Could Help Solve Big MysteriesQuanta Magazine - Marcus Woo The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and shape theories of cosmology. Of …
Quanta Magazineflipped into PhysicsQuantum Mechanics How Randomness Can Arise From DeterminismQuanta Magazine - Pradeep Mutalik Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior. Is nature inherently random? …
Quanta Magazineflipped into MathematicsMathematics With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes From EqualityQuanta Magazine - Kevin Hartnett Two monumental works have led many mathematicians to avoid the equal sign. Their goal: Rebuild the foundations of the discipline upon the looser …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Computer ScienceComputer Science Chemistry Nobel Goes to Lithium Battery InnovatorsQuanta Magazine - Jordana Cepelewicz John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing lithium-ion batteries, "the hidden …
Quanta Magazineflipped into PhysicsNobel Prize Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Discovery of Extrasolar PlanetsQuanta Magazine - Michael Moyer The astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz shared half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of a planet around a distant star. The cosmologist …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Top StoriesUniverse Physics Nobel Honors Early Universe and Exoplanet DiscoveriesQuanta Magazine - Michael Moyer The astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The …
Quanta Magazineflipped into BiologyOxygen Nobel Prize Awarded for Cells’ Adaptations to OxygenQuanta Magazine - John Rennie The 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine honored work on understanding how cells adjust to low oxygen levels. William G. Kaelin, Jr. of the …
Quanta Magazineflipped into BiologyBacteria Cell-Bacteria Mergers Offer Clues to How Organelles EvolvedQuanta Magazine - Viviane Callier Cells in symbiotic partnership, nested one within the other and functioning like organelles, can borrow from their host’s genes to complete their own …
Quanta Magazineflipped into PhysicsQuantum Computing Why I Called It ‘Quantum Supremacy’Quanta Magazine - John Preskill Researchers finally seem to have a quantum computer that can outperform a classical computer. But what does that really mean? A recent paper from …
Quanta Magazineflipped into BiologyOceans How Jurassic Plankton Stole Control of the Ocean’s ChemistryQuanta Magazine - Christie Wilcox Only 170 million years ago, new plankton evolved. Their demand for carbon and calcium permanently transformed the seas as homes for life.
Quanta Magazineflipped into BiologyThe Brain Your Brain Chooses What to Let You SeeQuanta Magazine - Jordana Cepelewicz Beneath our awareness, the brain lets certain kinds of stimuli automatically capture our attention by lowering the priority of the rest. Last week, …
Quanta Magazineflipped into MathematicsPuzzles Solution: ‘Perfect Randomness’Quanta Magazine - Pradeep Mutalik Is nature inherently random or is perfect randomness just an illusion based on our ignorance? In last month’s Insights column, we explored randomness …
Quanta Magazineflipped into MathematicsMathematics Big Question About Primes Proved in Small Number SystemsQuanta Magazine - Kevin Hartnett The twin primes conjecture is one of the most important and difficult questions in mathematics. Two mathematicians have solved a parallel version of …
Quanta Magazineflipped into PhysicsInternet To Invent a Quantum InternetQuanta Magazine - Natalie Wolchover Fifty years after the current internet was born, the physicist and computer scientist Stephanie Wehner is planning and designing the next internet — …
Quanta Magazineflipped into BiologyEducation To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a SpotlightQuanta Magazine - Jordana Cepelewicz A brain circuit that suppresses distracting sensory information holds important clues about attention and other cognitive processes. We can pick out a …
Quanta Magazineflipped into MathematicsMathematics On Your Mark, Get Set, MultiplyQuanta Magazine - Patrick Honner The way you learned to multiply works, but computers employ a faster algorithm. This summer, battle lines were drawn over a simple math problem: 8 ÷ …
Quanta Magazineflipped into PhysicsMachine Learning Quanta MagazineQuanta Magazine - Ashley Smart After successfully predicting laboratory earthquakes, a team of geophysicists has applied a machine learning algorithm to quakes in the Pacific …
Quanta Magazineflipped into BiologyCalcium Math Reveals the Secrets of Cells’ Feedback CircuitryQuanta Magazine - XiaoZhi Lim Maintaining perfect stability through negative feedback is a basic element of electrical circuitry, but it’s been a mystery how cells could do it — …
Quanta Magazineflipped into BiologyScience Origin-of-Life Study Points to Chemical Chimeras, Not RNA | Quanta MagazineQuanta Magazine - Jordana Cepelewicz Origin-of-life researchers have usually studied the potential of pure starting materials, but messy chemical composites may kick-start life more …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Computer ScienceComputer Science Computers and Humans ‘See’ Differently. Does It Matter? | Quanta MagazineQuanta Magazine - Kevin Hartnett In some ways, machine vision is superior to human vision. In other ways, it may never catch up. When engineers first endeavored to teach computers to …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Physics Long-Lived Stellar Blast Kindles Hope of a Supernova We’ve Never Seen BeforeQuanta Magazine - Robin Andrews A giant star’s death throes may offer the first evidence of a pair-instability supernova, and a glimpse of the first stars in the universe. The early …
Quanta Magazineflipped into PhysicsProtons Physicists Finally Nail the Proton’s Size, and Hope DiesQuanta Magazine - Natalie Wolchover A new measurement appears to have eliminated an anomaly that had captivated physicists for nearly a decade. In 2010, physicists in Germany reported …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Biology New Hybrid Species Remix Old Genes Creatively | Quanta MagazineQuanta Magazine - Jonathan Lambert Clues from fish diversity suggest that interbreeding between species could be a major mechanism of fast speciation.
Quanta Magazineflipped into Physics Are We All Wrong About Black Holes?Quanta Magazine - Brendan Z. Foster Craig Callender worries that the analogy between black holes and thermodynamics has been stretched too far. In the early 1970s, people studying …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Biology Bacterial Clones Show Surprising IndividualityQuanta Magazine - Carrie Arnold Genetically identical bacteria should all be the same, but in fact, the cells are stubbornly varied individuals. That heterogeneity may be an …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Top StoriesScience Strange Metal-like Bonds Discovered in Customized CrystalsQuanta Magazine - Erika K. Carlson While studying materials made from DNA-coated nanoparticles, researchers found a new form of this matter: lattices in which smaller particles roam …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Physics Possible Detection of a Black Hole So Big It ‘Should Not Exist’Quanta Magazine - Natalie Wolchover At stake are fundamental ideas about how black holes form — and a six-way bet. Black hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the …
Quanta Magazineflipped into Biology Soil’s Microbial Market Shows the Ruthless Side of ForestsQuanta Magazine - Gabriel Popkin In the “underground economy” for soil nutrients, fungi strike hard bargains and punish plants that won’t meet their price. Beneath the green vegetable …
