Podcast Episodes
Back to Search
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…
9 months, 2 weeks 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…
9 months, 2 weeks 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…
9 months, 3 weeks 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…
10 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…
10 months, 1 week 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…
10 months, 3 weeks 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…
11 months, 1 week ago
How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero
Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates something out of nothing.
The po…
1 year ago
The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology
Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore…
1 year ago
The Cellular Secret to Resisting the Pressure of the Deep Sea
Cell membranes from comb jellies reveal a new kind of adaptation to the deep sea: curvy lipids that conform to an ideal shape under pressure.
The pos…
1 year, 1 month ago