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A 'Lobby' Where a Molecule Mob Tells Genes What to Do

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Gene regulation in humans and other complex organisms is an elaborate process involving many molecular factors...
Gene regulation in humans and other complex organisms is an elaborate process involving many molecular factors that can have opposing effects. Nan Cao for Quanta Magazine The discovery during the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s that we humans have only about 20,000 protein-coding genes — about as many as the...
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Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

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To See Black Holes in Detail, She Uses 'Echoes' Like a Bat

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February 12, 2024Erin Kara studies the supermassive black holes that pin galaxies to the fabric of...
February 12, 2024Erin Kara studies the supermassive black holes that pin galaxies to the fabric of the cosmos. Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine Unlike many astronomers, Erin Kara didn’t grow up star-struck. “I don’t have that story of being that little kid staring up at the stars and wanting to do this, which ga...
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Evolution: Fast or Slow? Lizards Help Resolve a Paradox

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Maze Proof Establishes a 'Backbone' for Statistical Mechanics

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Unscrambling the Hidden Secrets of Superpermutations

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Four. Three. One. Five. Two. Nothing happens. The evil genius Derango is loading a cataclysmic computer...
Four. Three. One. Five. Two. Nothing happens. The evil genius Derango is loading a cataclysmic computer virus that, when launched, will lock the entire world out of the internet. In five minutes, no one will be able to access their online bank accounts, networked video games or online TV shows ever again! Three. One...
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Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time

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Allison Li for Quanta Magazine About 70 years ago, an engineer at IBM named Hans Peter...
Allison Li for Quanta Magazine About 70 years ago, an engineer at IBM named Hans Peter Luhn quietly changed the course of computer science. Luhn already held several patents, including one for a device that could measure a cloth’s thread count and another for a guide that determined what mixed drinks you could make ...
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In a 'Dark Dimension,' Physicists Search for the Universe's Missing Matter

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Since then, scientists have wrestled with one striking characteristic of lambda: Its estimated value of 10−122...
Since then, scientists have wrestled with one striking characteristic of lambda: Its estimated value of 10−122 in Planck units is “the smallest measured parameter in physics,” said Cumrun Vafa, a physicist at Harvard University. In 2022, while considering that almost unfathomable smallness with two members of his re...
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What Makes for 'Good' Mathematics?

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We tend to think of mathematics as purely logical, but the teaching of math, its values,...
We tend to think of mathematics as purely logical, but the teaching of math, its values, its usefulness and its workings are packed with nuance. So what is “good” mathematics? In 2007, the mathematician Terence Tao wrote an essay for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society that sought to answer this questi...
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How to Build an Origami Computer

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In 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing came up with an idea for a universal computer....
In 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing came up with an idea for a universal computer. It was a simple device: an infinite strip of tape covered in zeros and ones, together with a machine that could move back and forth along the tape, changing zeros to ones and vice versa according to some set of rules. He sh...
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Linear Programming - Researchers Approach New Speed Limit for Seminal Problem

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That’s not to say it’s easy work. It wasn’t until 1983 that the mathematician Hendrik Lenstra...
That’s not to say it’s easy work. It wasn’t until 1983 that the mathematician Hendrik Lenstra proved that the general problem was even solvable, providing the first algorithm that could do it. Lenstra thought about ILP geometrically. First, he turned the inequalities at the heart of ILP into a convex shape, such as ...
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Neighborhoods for Starting a Life in the Galaxy

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The quest to decode the Mandelbrot set

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In the mid-1980s, like Walkman cassette players and tie-dyed shirts, the buglike silhouette of the Mandelbrot...
In the mid-1980s, like Walkman cassette players and tie-dyed shirts, the buglike silhouette of the Mandelbrot set was everywhere. Students plastered it to dorm room walls around the world. Mathematicians received hundreds of letters, eager requests for printouts of the set. (In response, some of them produced catalo...
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New theory suggests LLMs can understand text

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Artificial intelligence seems more powerful than ever, with chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT capable of producing...
Artificial intelligence seems more powerful than ever, with chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT capable of producing uncannily humanlike text. But for all their talents, these bots still leave researchers wondering: Do such models actually understand what they are saying? “Clearly, some people believe they do,” said the ...
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The Quest for Simple Rules to Build a Microbial Community

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Math's 'Game of Life' Reveals Long-Sought Repeating Patterns

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Throughout the 1970s, mathematicians and hobbyists filled in the other short periods and found a smattering...
Throughout the 1970s, mathematicians and hobbyists filled in the other short periods and found a smattering of longer ones. Eventually, mathematicians discovered a systematic way to build long-period oscillators. But oscillators with periods between 15 and 43 proved tough to find. “People have been trying to figure ...
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A collector of math and physics surprises (2018)

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November 27, 2018The mathematician Tadashi Tokieda, pictured at Stanford University, relishes the “toys” he finds in...
November 27, 2018The mathematician Tadashi Tokieda, pictured at Stanford University, relishes the “toys” he finds in nature. He says that “a child and a scientist can share the same surprise.” Constanza Hevia H. for Quanta Magazine Tadashi Tokieda lives in a world in which ordinary objects do extraordinary things. J...
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Rogue Worlds Throw Planetary Ideas Out of Orbit

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'Magical' Error Correction Scheme Proved Inherently Inefficient

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If you’ve ever sent a text message, played a CD, or stored a file in the...
If you’ve ever sent a text message, played a CD, or stored a file in the cloud, you’ve benefited from error correction. This revolutionary idea dates back to the 1940s, when researchers first realized that it’s possible to rewrite any message in a form that allows later corruption to be easily reversed. Over the yea...
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Cells Across the Body Talk to Each Other About Aging

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Now, Dillin and his team have expanded that finding by discovering new details about how mitochondria...
Now, Dillin and his team have expanded that finding by discovering new details about how mitochondria in the brain communicate with cells across the worm’s body to extend life. First, he had to understand why damage to the brain’s mitochondria could possibly have a beneficial effect on the organism. A mitochondrion’...
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Deep Beneath Earth's Surface, Clues to Life's Origins

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