About the author George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine and the author of three books: Spooky Action at a Distance, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory, and ...

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

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 ...

A mathematical mechanism enables AI models to process language at scale, undergirding the current AI revolution. Our ...

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 ...

Veronique Greenwood is a science writer and essayist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Discover, Aeon, and other publications.

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 ...

With electrical signals, simple cells organize themselves into complex societies and negotiate with other colonies.

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.

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.

Two mathematicians have proved that a straightforward question — how hard is it to untie a knot? — has a complicated answer. Three high schoolers and their mentor revisited a century-old theorem to ...