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Audio Edition: The Cells That Breathe Two Ways
In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same t…
4 months, 3 weeks ago
Quantum Mechanics Might Be a Secret Key to Secure Communication
Together, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard figured out how to use the laws of quantum physics to keep secret messages safe from eavesdroppers. The…
4 months, 3 weeks ago
Is String Theory Still Our Best Hope?
Is string theory the one true “theory of everything?” Some physicists swear it’s a fundamental ingredient of nature. Others wish it would just go awa…
5 months ago
Audio Edition: New Physics-Inspired Proof Probes the Borders of Disorder
Season 1
For decades, mathematicians have struggled to understand matrices that reflect both order and randomness, like those that model semiconductors. A new…
5 months ago
One of Nature’s Most Complex Molecular Machines
At the center of little holes in cell nuclei is a mystery. Here, clumps of proteins wiggle disordered tails around like seaweed. They drive a molecul…
5 months, 1 week ago
The Fundamental Tension at the Heart of Math
We tend to think of math as all about logic and rigor. But what “rigor” actually means has been shaken up quite a few times over the past few centuri…
5 months, 2 weeks ago
Audio Edition: AI Comes Up With Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work.
Artificial intelligence software is designing novel experimental protocols that improve upon the work of human physicists, although the humans are st…
5 months, 2 weeks ago
Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff?
Humanoid robots can run, crawl, and sort objects in flashy demos. So why can’t they reliably climb stairs or open doors? On this episode of The Quant…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Uniting a Century of Digital and Analog Astronomy
To better understand our cosmos, some astronomers and astrophysicists go old school. Preserved beautifully on a hundred years of glass plate photogra…
5 months, 4 weeks ago
Audio Edition: Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity
Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an i…
6 months ago