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The Shape That Can’t Pass Through Itself
Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s big enough for the other to slide through? It is —…
4 hours ago
Audio Edition: How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?
Season 1
Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ.
The sto…
5 days, 4 hours ago
AI Filters Will Always Have Holes
Season 1
Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help with that.” But users have long played a cat-and-mouse game to try to…
1 week ago
ICYMI: Birds' Migratory Mitochondria
(This episode was first published in June 2025.)
Changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of flight …
2 weeks ago
ICYMI: Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?
(This episode was first published in July 2025.)
Where does gravity come from? In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, this question is a b…
3 weeks ago
Audio Edition: The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered
Season 1 Episode 39
By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unified …
3 weeks, 5 days ago
Taking the Temperature of Quantum Entanglement
Season 1 Episode 38
We all know that hot coffee cools down. But quantum mechanics can enable heat to flow the “wrong” way, making hot objects hotter and cold objects col…
4 weeks ago
How Hard Is It to Untie a Knot?
Season 1 Episode 37
In math and science, knots do far more than keep shoes on feet. For more than a century, mathematicians have studied the properties of different knot…
1 month ago
Audio Edition: How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory
Season 1 Episode 36
When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement — and its inverse — have deep connections to many areas of math…
1 month, 1 week ago
What Happens When Lakes Stop Mixing
Season 1 Episode 35
Every summer since 1983, scientists at Crater Lake National Park have gathered data about the lake’s famous clarity. This past summer, Quanta contrib…
1 month, 1 week ago