C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. Experimental data is finally confirming, and complicating, his ...

The collective electrical activity of many neurons can be seen as waves propagating through the brain from one region to the ...

The late Ronald Graham wore two hats. He was a renowned mathematician, at one time president of the American Mathematical Society. He was also a serious juggler, and president of the International ...

Sarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees the potential for large language models to both help and harm her field. Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence?

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition. Building a ...

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks. The Quanta Newsletter ...

For the first time in 30 years, computer scientists have found a better way to allocate objects evenly between two groups. Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence ...

Kevin Hartnett was the senior writer at Quanta Magazine covering mathematics and computer science. His work has been collected in multiple volumes of the “Best Writing on Mathematics” series.

In the first episode of the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses how she discovered CRISPR’s genome-editing power, the breakthroughs and hurdles during its ...

A simple scaling law brings order to the chaos of flowing water, rock, and sediment. New findings have extended the law even further. We Know Simple Fluids Can Flow. Turns Out, Some Can Fracture.

John Pavlus is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Scientists assumed that energy flows in only one direction in a turbulent system. What they didn’t know, until they looked closely at brine shrimp, was that a simple factor can reverse the flow.