Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAudio Edition: Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case.
Season 1 Episode 5
Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof.
The story Heat Destroys All …
1 year, 3 months ago
In Computers, Memory Is More Useful Than Time
Season 1 Episode 4
One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science.
This is the third…
1 year, 3 months ago
Math and Beauty in the Age of AI
Season 1 Episode 3
Mathematicians have started to prepare for a profound shift in what it means to do math.
This is the second episode of our new weekly series The Quant…
1 year, 3 months ago
Audio Edition: Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way.
Season 1 Episode 2
Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language. By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, linguists can use neural ne…
1 year, 4 months ago
AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK
Season 1 Episode 1
The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.
This is the first episode of our new weekly serie…
1 year, 4 months ago
Introducing The Quanta Podcast
Season 1 Episode 1
The Quanta Podcast is your weekly dispatch from the frontiers of science and mathematics. In each episode, editor in chief Samir Patel will talk to t…
1 year, 4 months ago
Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold
In a first, researchers have shown that adding more “qubits” to a quantum computer can make it more resilient. It’s an essential step on the long roa…
1 year, 4 months ago
Fish Have a Brain Microbiome. Could Humans Have One Too?
The discovery that other vertebrates have healthy, microbial brains is fueling the still controversial possibility that we might have them as well.
T…
1 year, 5 months ago
Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound
Three new species of superconductivity were spotted this year, illustrating the myriad ways electrons can join together to form a frictionless quantu…
1 year, 5 months ago
It Might Be Possible to Detect Gravitons After All
A new experimental proposal suggests detecting a particle of gravity is far easier than anyone imagined. Now physicists are debating what it would re…
1 year, 5 months ago