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More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems. Has the powerful metaphor lost its mathematical meaning? The post Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes. The post Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness. The post Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Researchers have shown how to find the simplest description of a data set faster than by simply checking every possibility. The post Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade. The post Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely how much pleasure and pain animals experience during different forms of touch. The post Pleasure or Pain? He Maps the Neural Circuits That Decide. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians think abstract tools from a field called symplectic geometry might help with planning missions to far-off moons and planets. The post Geometers Engineer New Tools to Wrangle Spacecraft Orbits first appeared on Quanta Magazine

By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. The post How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Founding editor-in-chief Thomas Lin looks back at a decade of Quanta journalism and forward to what’s next for the magazine. The post My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine first appeared on Quanta Magazine

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community. The post Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Black holes are inescapable traps for most of what falls into them — but there can be exceptions. The theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind speaks with co-host Janna Levin about the black hole information paradox and how it has propelled modern physics. The post Can Information Escape a Black Hole? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more. The post Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians have struggled to prove Falconer’s Conjecture, a simple, but far-reaching, hypothesis about the distances between points. They’re finally getting close. The post Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The timing of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024, will be known to within a second, thousands of years after fearful humans first started trying to anticipate these cosmic events. The post How the Ancient Art of Eclipse Prediction Became an Exact Science first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A generation of physicists has referred to the dark energy that permeates the universe as “the cosmological constant.” Now the largest map of the cosmos to date hints that this mysterious energy has been changing over billions of years. The post Dark Energy May Be Weakening, Major Astrophysics Study Finds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

After a decade out of the spotlight, the brain cells once alleged to explain empathy, autism and theory of mind are being refined and redefined. The post Overexposure Distorted the Science of Mirror Neurons first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians have illuminated what sets of points can look like if the distances between them are all whole numbers. The post Merging Fields, Mathematicians Go the Distance on Old Problem first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Our brain waves can align when we work and play closely together. The phenomenon, known as interbrain synchrony, suggests that collaboration is biological. The post The Social Benefits of Getting Our Brains in Sync first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. From chaotic assemblies of life, order somehow emerges. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz interviews the evolutionary ecologist Iain Couzin about how and why collective behaviors arise. The post How Is Flocking Like Computing? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Russell Impagliazzo studies hard problems, the limits of cryptography, the nature of randomness and more. The post The Researcher Who Explores Computation by Conjuring New Worlds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians are using topological abstractions to find places where it’s hard to vote. The post Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In the search for the most scalable hardware to use for quantum computers, qubits made of individual atoms are having a breakout moment. The post The Best Qubits for Quantum Computing Might Just Be Atoms first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Recursion builds bridges between ideas from across different math classes and illustrates the power of creative mathematical thinking. The post Math That Connects Where We’re Going to Where We’ve Been first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are beginning to understand why. The post How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute first appeared on Quanta Magazine