Science and Math News | Quanta Magazine
The first planet beyond our solar system was identified just 30 years ago. Since then, thousands have been found and characterized. As we look for more, exoplanet experts are also probing for signs of alien biospheres hundreds of light-years away.
The Year in Biology | Quanta Magazine
Dec 18, 2024 · Biologists Meet the AI Revolution . In 2024, hardly a week could go by without some big new paper related to Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2: a neural network that can accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of a folded protein from the one-dimensional string of its amino acid molecules.In drug discovery, for example, biologists tested its ability to identify new drug targets and ...
What Is a Particle? - Quanta Magazine
Nov 12, 2020 · The picture soon got even stranger. In the 1930s, physicists realized that the wave functions of many individual photons collectively behave like a single wave propagating through conjoined electric and magnetic fields — exactly the classical picture of light discovered in the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell.
How the Higgs Field (Actually) Gives Mass to Elementary Particles
Sep 3, 2024 · This notion lies at the heart of what the late British physicist Peter Higgs, namesake of the Higgs field, and his competitors pointed out in the 1960s: that one field can stiffen other fields, thereby permitting their ripples to vibrate in place with a resonant frequency, and thus giving their particles mass.
Physics News, Interviews and Columns | Quanta Magazine
Jan 10, 2025 · Quanta’s award-winning coverage of astrophysics, cosmology, quantum physics, geophysics, condensed matter, statistical mechanics, chaos theory, climate science and more.
What Is Quantum Teleportation? - Quanta Magazine
Mar 14, 2024 · Teleporting people through space is still science fiction. But quantum teleportation is dramatically different and entirely real. In this episode, Janna Levin interviews the theoretical physicist John Preskill about teleporting bits and the promise of quantum technology.
Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold
Dec 9, 2024 · Quanta Magazine moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected.
High-Temperature Superconductivity Understood at Last
Sep 21, 2022 · The research advances the perennial ambition of the field: to take cuprate superconductivity and strengthen its underlying mechanism, in order to design world-changing materials capable of superconducting electricity at even higher temperatures.
A New Map of All the Particles and Forces | Quanta Magazine
Oct 22, 2020 · This approach doesn’t offer insight into the relationships between the particles. The force-carrying particles (namely the photon, which conveys the electromagnetic force; the W and Z bosons, which convey the weak force; and the gluons, which convey the strong force) are put on the same footing as the matter particles those forces act …
A Mathematician’s Guided Tour Through High Dimensions
Sep 13, 2021 · This all adds up to an intuitive understanding that an abstract space is n-dimensional if there are n degrees of freedom within it (as those birds had), or if it requires n coordinates to describe the location of a point. Yet, as we shall see, mathematicians discovered that dimension is more complex than these simplistic descriptions imply.