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How a 17-Year-Old Solved a Major Math Mystery
Season 1 Episode 23
In the field of harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates.
Earlier this year, a 17-year-old …
1 year ago
Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface
Season 1 Episode 22
In science textbooks, Earth looks like a round layer cake. There's a hard line between the liquid metal core and the putty-like rock mantle. But mayb…
1 year ago
Audio Edition: The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’
Season 1 Episode 21
Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that …
1 year ago
A New Quantum Math of Cryptography
Season 1 Episode 20
We’re living in the golden age of cryptography. Since the 1970s, we've had more confidence in encryption than ever before. But there's a difference b…
1 year ago
How an Outsider Optimized Sphere-Packing
Season 1 Episode 19
How many oranges can you fit in a box? Mathematicians are obsessed with perfecting their answer to this question in not just our familiar three-dimen…
1 year, 1 month ago
Audio Edition: Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture
Season 1 Episode 18
A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed …
1 year, 1 month ago
‘It’s a Mess’: A Brain-Bending Trip to Quantum Theory’s 100th Birthday Party
Season 1 Episode 17
As far as we know, quantum mechanics is a universal theory that explains matter and light more or less perfectly. It shows us why atoms don't collaps…
1 year, 1 month ago
How Smell Guides Our Inner World
Season 1 Episode 17
When some people smell the molecule benzyl acetate, they identify a distinctly banana-y scent. But when others sniff the same compound, they get hint…
1 year, 1 month ago
Audio Edition: How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories
Season 1 Episode 16
By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage pro…
1 year, 1 month ago
When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field
Season 1 Episode 16
The study of natural language processing, or NLP, dates back to the 1940s. It gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies a…
1 year, 1 month ago