The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set…
Read more Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up PricesThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the…
Read more How Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Grow Living ThingsIn 2011, Deconinck and Oliveras simulated different disturbances with higher and higher frequencies and watched what happened to the Stokes waves. As they expected, for disturbances above a…
Read more The Hidden Math of Ocean WavesThe duo kept their program running in the background for over a decade. During that time, a couple of computers from their ragtag collection succumbed to overheating and…
Read more Unpicking How to Measure the Complexity of KnotsThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If there’s one law of physics that seems easy to grasp, it’s the second law of thermodynamics: Heat…
Read more Physicists Create a Thermometer for Measuring ‘Quantumness’But in some ways, the proof was a bit unsatisfying. Jitomirskaya and Avila had used a method that only applied to certain irrational values of alpha. By combining…
Read more The ‘10 Martini’ Proof Connects Quantum Mechanics With Infinitely Intricate Mathematical StructuresThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example,…
Read more A New Algorithm Makes It Faster to Find the Shortest PathsThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Since their discovery in 1982, exotic materials known as quasicrystals have bedeviled physicists and chemists. Their atoms arrange…
Read more The Mystery of How Quasicrystals Form“There are only a couple of things that are so important for your body that there’s a completely innate drive to get it if you fall into deficiency,”…
Read more What Is Thirst?The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount…
Read more Distillation Can Make AI Models Smaller and CheaperBut just how much harder? In 1962, the mathematician Tibor Radó invented a new way to explore this question through what he called the busy beaver game. To…
Read more The Quest to Find the Longest-Running Simple Computer ProgramThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems…
Read more The New Math of Quantum CryptographyThe team members went through a process of incrementally determining what elements and molecules the bacterial strain could grow on. They already knew it could use oxygen, so…
Read more These Newly Discovered Cells Breathe in Two WaysThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems…
Read more The Hidden Ingredients Behind AI’s Creativity“It provides a natural framework, or a bookkeeping mechanism, to assemble very large numbers of Feynman diagrams,” said Marcus Spradlin, a physicist at Brown University who has been…
Read more The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and TimeThis developing field, known as aerial electroreception, opens up a new dimension of the natural world. “I find it absolutely fascinating,” said Anna Dornhaus, a behavioral ecologist at…
Read more The Secret Electrostatic World of InsectsTo study the cell membranes of deep-sea animals, the biochemist Itay Budin (center) joined forces with marine biologists Steve Haddock (right) and Jacob Winnikoff (left). Photographs: From left:…
Read more How Cells Resist the Pressure of the Deep SeaThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For a molecule of RNA, the world is a dangerous place. Unlike DNA, which can persist for millions…
Read more Cells From Different Species Can Exchange ‘Text Messages’ Using RNAFiguring out what subgroups a group contains is one way to understand its structure. For example, the subgroups of Z6 are {0}, {0, 2, 4} and {0, 3}—the…
Read more ‘Groups’ Underpin Modern Math. Here’s How They WorkThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car…
Read more The Vagus Nerve’s Crucial Role in Creating the Human Sense of Mind
