Gadgets
Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the…
Tag: Quanta Magazine
Gadgets
How Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Grow Living Things
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down…
Gadgets
The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves
[ad_1] In 2011, Deconinck and Oliveras simulated different disturbances with higher and higher frequencies and watched what happened to the Stokes waves. As they…
Gadgets
Unpicking How to Measure the Complexity of Knots
[ad_1] The duo kept their program running in the background for over a decade. During that time, a couple of computers from their ragtag…
Gadgets
Physicists Create a Thermometer for Measuring ‘Quantumness’
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If there’s one law of physics that seems easy to grasp, it’s the…
Gadgets
The ‘10 Martini’ Proof Connects Quantum Mechanics With Infinitely Intricate Mathematical Structures
[ad_1] But in some ways, the proof was a bit unsatisfying. Jitomirskaya and Avila had used a method that only applied to certain irrational…
Gadgets
A New Algorithm Makes It Faster to Find the Shortest Paths
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get…
Gadgets
The Mystery of How Quasicrystals Form
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Since their discovery in 1982, exotic materials known as quasicrystals have bedeviled physicists…
Gadgets
What Is Thirst?
[ad_1] “There are only a couple of things that are so important for your body that there’s a completely innate drive to get it…
Gadgets
Distillation Can Make AI Models Smaller and Cheaper
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1,…
Gadgets
The Quest to Find the Longest-Running Simple Computer Program
[ad_1] But just how much harder? In 1962, the mathematician Tibor Radó invented a new way to explore this question through what he called…
Gadgets
The New Math of Quantum Cryptography
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s…
Gadgets
These Newly Discovered Cells Breathe in Two Ways
[ad_1] The team members went through a process of incrementally determining what elements and molecules the bacterial strain could grow on. They already knew…
Gadgets
The Hidden Ingredients Behind AI’s Creativity
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the…
Gadgets
The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time
[ad_1] “It provides a natural framework, or a bookkeeping mechanism, to assemble very large numbers of Feynman diagrams,” said Marcus Spradlin, a physicist at…
Gadgets
The Secret Electrostatic World of Insects
[ad_1] This developing field, known as aerial electroreception, opens up a new dimension of the natural world. “I find it absolutely fascinating,” said Anna…
Gadgets
How Cells Resist the Pressure of the Deep Sea
[ad_1] To study the cell membranes of deep-sea animals, the biochemist Itay Budin (center) joined forces with marine biologists Steve Haddock (right) and Jacob…
Gadgets
Cells From Different Species Can Exchange ‘Text Messages’ Using RNA
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For a molecule of RNA, the world is a dangerous place. Unlike DNA,…
Gadgets
‘Groups’ Underpin Modern Math. Here’s How They Work
[ad_1] Figuring out what subgroups a group contains is one way to understand its structure. For example, the subgroups of Z6 are {0}, {0,…
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The Vagus Nerve’s Crucial Role in Creating the Human Sense of Mind
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in…