“Ribbon concordance” will let mathematicians compare knots by linking them across four-dimensional space. The post How Complex Is a Knot? New Proof Reveals Ranking System That Works. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

By resolving a paradox about light in a box, researchers hope to clarify the concept of energy in quantum theory. The post Puzzling Quantum Scenario Appears Not to Conserve Energy first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope released a historic image of a supermassive black hole in another galaxy. The follow-up — an image of Sagittarius A* — shows it shimmering at the center of our own. The post Black Hole Image Reveals the

Several projects are aiming to bring back mammoths and other species that have vanished from the planet. Whether that’s technically possible is beside the point. The post Why ‘De-Extinction’ Is Impossible (But Could Work Anyway) first appe

Throwing out data seems to make measurements of distances and angles more precise. The reason why has been traced to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The post Physicists Pin Down How Quantum Uncertainty Sharpens Measurements first appea

Van der Waerden’s conjecture mystified mathematicians for 85 years. Its solution shows how polynomial roots relate to one another. The post New Proof Illuminates the Hidden Structure of Common Equations first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Cryptographers want to know which of five possible worlds we inhabit, which will reveal whether truly secure cryptography is even possible. The post Which Computational Universe Do We Live In? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Language processing programs are notoriously hard to interpret, but smaller versions can provide important insights into how they work. The post Researchers Gain New Understanding From Simple AI first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Life could use a more expansive genetic code in theory, but new work shows that improving on three-letter codons would be a challenge. The post Life With Longer Genetic Codes Seems Possible — but Less Likely first appeared on Quanta Magazi

A new analysis of W bosons suggests these particles are significantly heavier than predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. The post Newly Measured Particle Seems Heavy Enough to Break Known Physics first appeared on Quanta Mag

The optical properties of mitochondrial bundles in the retina may improve how efficiently the eye captures light. The post Mitochondria Double as Tiny Lenses in the Eye first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The result could help researchers answer a larger question about flattening objects from the fourth dimension to the third dimension. The post Father-Son Team Solves Geometry Problem With Infinite Folds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The American mathematician invented entire new ways to understand shapes and spaces. The post Dennis Sullivan, Uniter of Topology and Chaos, Wins the Abel Prize first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists are devising clever new ways to exploit the extreme sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. But so far, they’ve seen no signs of exotica. The post A New Tool for Finding Dark Matter Digs Up Nothing first appeared

An experiment conducted on hybrid matter-antimatter atoms has defied researchers’ expectations. The post An Antimatter Experiment Shows Surprises Near Absolute Zero first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new proof significantly strengthens a decades-old result about the ubiquity of ways to represent whole numbers as sums of unit fractions. The post Math’s ‘Oldest Problem Ever’ Gets a New Answer first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The discovery that short peptides can form spontaneously on cosmic dust hints at more of a role for them in the earliest stages of life’s origin, on Earth or elsewhere. The post Peptides on Stardust May Have Provided a Shortcut to Life fir

A new computer program fashioned after artificial intelligence systems like AlphaGo has solved several open problems in combinatorics and graph theory. The post In New Math Proofs, Artificial Intelligence Plays to Win first appeared on Qua

While watching a fearful memory take shape in the brain of a living fish, neuroscientists see an unexpected level of rewiring occur in the synaptic connections. The post Scientists Watch a Memory Form in a Living Brain first appeared on Qu

When astronomers tried to confirm a signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, they saw nothing. The post Four Years On, New Experiment Sees No Sign of ‘Cosmic Dawn’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A 3D digital model of a “minimal cell” leads scientists closer to understanding the barest requirements for life. The post Most Complete Simulation of a Cell Probes Life’s Hidden Rules first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Algorithms that use the brain’s communication signal can now work on analog neuromorphic chips, which closely mimic our energy-efficient brains. The post AI Overcomes Stumbling Block on Brain-Inspired Hardware first appeared on Quanta Maga

The strong force holds protons and neutrons together, but the theory behind it is largely inscrutable. Two new approaches show how it works. The post The Mysterious Forces Inside the Nucleus Grow a Little Less Strange first appeared on Qua

Three mathematicians show, for the first time, how to form a square with the same area as a circle by cutting them into interchangeable pieces that can be visualized. The post An Ancient Geometry Problem Falls to New Mathematical Technique

The same phenomenon by which an opera singer can shatter a wineglass also underlies the very existence of subatomic particles. The post How the Physics of Resonance Shapes Reality first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In computer simulations of possible universes, researchers have discovered that a neural network can infer the amount of matter in a whole universe by studying just one of its galaxies. The post Any Single Galaxy Reveals the Composition of

For years, intermediate measurements made it hard to quantify the complexity of quantum algorithms. New work establishes that those measurements aren’t necessary after all. The post Computer Scientists Eliminate Pesky Quantum Computations

Physicists have been busy exploring how our universe might emerge like a hologram out of a two-dimensional sheet. New clues have come from the symmetries found on an infinitely distant “celestial sphere.” The post Symmetries Reveal Clues

A surprising new solution to Leonhard Euler’s famous “36 officers puzzle” offers a novel way of encoding quantum information. The post Euler’s 243-Year-Old ‘Impossible’ Puzzle Gets a Quantum Solution first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new result shows that quantum information can theoretically be protected from errors just as well as classical information can. The post Qubits Can Be as Safe as Bits, Researchers Show first appeared on Quanta Magazine