The Quanta Podcast
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The Quanta Podcast
Exploring the distant universe, the insides of cells, the abstractions of math, the complexity of information itself, and much more, The Quanta Podcast is a tour of the frontier between the known and the unknown. In each episode, Quanta Magazine Editor-in-Chief Samir Patel speaks with the minds behi...
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The Math of Catastrophe
Around 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was a lush grassland. Then, as if a switch flipped, it began to dry out, becoming the desert that we know today. Ti...
Audio Edition: Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems
It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it...
What Can a Cell Remember?
“Memory” means many things to many people, and in many fields. We tend to understand memory to be a phenomenon that happens primarily in the brain, bu...
Climate Modeling Is at a Crossroads
The climate is changing. So is the way we understand the climate. On this week's episode, contributing writer Zack Savitsky joins host Samir Patel to...
Audio Edition: A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems
Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species.
The story A New, Chemical Vie...
AI's Dark Side Is Only a Nudge Away
In order to trust machines with important jobs, we need a high level of confidence that they share our values and goals. Recent work shows that this “...
How We Came To Know Earth
For most of us, the word “climate” immediately generates thoughts of melting ice, rising seas, wildfires and gathering storms. However, in the course...
Audio Edition: ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture
The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a wh...
How a 17-Year-Old Solved a Major Math Mystery
In the field of harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates.
Earlier this year, a 17-yea...
Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface
In science textbooks, Earth looks like a round layer cake. There's a hard line between the liquid metal core and the putty-like rock mantle. But maybe...
Audio Edition: The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’
Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that m...
A New Quantum Math of Cryptography
We’re living in the golden age of cryptography. Since the 1970s, we've had more confidence in encryption than ever before. But there's a difference be...
How an Outsider Optimized Sphere-Packing
How many oranges can you fit in a box? Mathematicians are obsessed with perfecting their answer to this question in not just our familiar three-dimens...
Audio Edition: Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture
A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed p...
‘It’s a Mess’: A Brain-Bending Trip to Quantum Theory’s 100th Birthday Party
As far as we know, quantum mechanics is a universal theory that explains matter and light more or less perfectly. It shows us why atoms don't collapse...
How Smell Guides Our Inner World
When some people smell the molecule benzyl acetate, they identify a distinctly banana-y scent. But when others sniff the same compound, they get hints...
Audio Edition: How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories
By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage prop...
When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field
The study of natural language processing, or NLP, dates back to the 1940s. It gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies an...
Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?
As weird as it sounds, infinity comes in many shapes and sizes. And attempting to quantify it is sort of like a dog chasing its own tail. Or like infi...
Audio Edition: After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem
Britta Späth has dedicated her career to proving a single, central conjecture. She’s finally succeeded, alongside her partner, Marc Cabanes.
The...
When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color?
Colorful messages are constantly being exchanged across the natural world, to communicate everything from sexual attraction to self defense. But which...
Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?
Where does gravity come from? In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, this question is a big problem. One controversial theory proposes that...
Audio Edition: How Noether’s Theorem Revolutionized Physics
Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights continue to shape physic...
How Amateurs Solved a Major Computer Science Puzzle
The Busy Beaver Challenge, an open online collaboration, started in 2022 to finally solve a major problem in theoretical computer science. Over time,...
The Mysterious Math of Turbulence
Turbulence is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to study. Mathematicians are now starting to untangle it at its smallest scales.
This is the si...
Audio Edition: Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build Memories
Individual cells in the brain light up for specific ideas. These concept neurons, once known as “Jennifer Aniston cells,” help us think, imagine and r...
Birds' Migratory Mitochondria
Changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of flight muscles provide extra energy for birds’ continent...
Singularities Are Hard to Kill
Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists must go to the ends of space and t...
Audio Edition: Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case.
Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof.
The story Heat Destroy...
In Computers, Memory Is More Useful Than Time
One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science.
This is the...
Math and Beauty in the Age of AI
Mathematicians have started to prepare for a profound shift in what it means to do math.
This is the second episode of our new weekly series The...
Audio Edition: Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way.
Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language. By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, linguists can use neural net...
AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK
The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.
This is the first episode of our new weekly...
Introducing The Quanta Podcast
The Quanta Podcast is your weekly dispatch from the frontiers of science and mathematics. In each episode, editor in chief Samir Patel will talk to th...
Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold
In a first, researchers have shown that adding more “qubits” to a quantum computer can make it more resilient. It’s an essential step on the long road...
Fish Have a Brain Microbiome. Could Humans Have One Too?
The discovery that other vertebrates have healthy, microbial brains is fueling the still controversial possibility that we might have them as well.
Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound
Three new species of superconductivity were spotted this year, illustrating the myriad ways electrons can join together to form a frictionless quantum...
It Might Be Possible to Detect Gravitons After All
A new experimental proposal suggests detecting a particle of gravity is far easier than anyone imagined. Now physicists are debating what it would rea...
How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero
Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates something out of nothing.
...
The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology
Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore...