Quanta Magazine
Illuminating mathematics, physics, biology and computer science research through public service journalism.
quantamagazine.orgOne of the best science publications on the internet. Quanta covers breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, biology, and computer science with the kind of narrative depth that makes you feel like you actually understand the research. Funded by the Simons Foundation and editorially independent, it manages to be both rigorous and genuinely enjoyable to read.
Publishing since 2013.
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We Know Simple Fluids Can Flow. Turns Out, Some Can Fracture.
Thamires Lima, a research professor in chemical engineering at Drexel University, studies the properties of thick, viscous liquids — think honey or molasses, though in a lab you’re more likely to find polypropylene or crude oil. Using a method called extensional rheology, Lima stretches liquids between metal plates to find the force that makes them flow. A few years ago, she was conducting a… Source
Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations?
Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated us for centuries, but despite decades of searching it remains frustratingly unanswered. Every so often a curious signal appears — fossilized structures in a meteorite, say, or an unusual gas in an exoplanet’s atmosphere — and for a moment it seems possible that we are not alone before the excitement gives way to a… Source
Is Life Just Different?
In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft, which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence… Source
Researchers Reveal the Power of ‘Quantum Proofs’
More than 30 years ago, researchers discovered that hypothetical computers based on the laws of quantum physics would be able to rapidly solve difficult math problems. Ever since then, they’ve sought to pinpoint cases where quantum computers are more powerful than their ordinary “classical” cousins. For nearly as long, a small band of computer scientists has pursued a related question that gets… Source
Astrophysicists Puzzle Over Webb’s New Universe
When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space… Source
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