Inside the Supermassive Debate Over the James Webb Telescope’s ‘Little Red Dots’
Even years after the discovery of the first little red dot, not much about them is settled. Dale…
Tiny Hairs That Help Corals Breathe May Malfunction in Warming Oceans
Every coral colony is cushioned by a thin boundary layer of water whose movement is slowed by friction…
Inside the Experimental Traps Scientists Set for Ghostly Neutrinos
Seventy years ago, the physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines took a custom-built 10-ton detector, surrounded it with…
The James Webb Telescope Is Changing Astronomers’ Understanding of the Ancient Cosmos
To test these new ideas, researchers are exploring the infant universe through simulations. “There’s actually been really remarkable…
The Nothing That Has the Potential to Be Anything
A recent example was published in 2025 by researchers at the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility near Hamburg,…
Scientists Found ‘Magic’ Particles in the Large Hadron Collider
In November, Quanta magazine published a feature on the detection of “magic” top quarks at CERN’s Large Hadron…
For the First Time, AI Analyzes Language as Well as a Human Expert
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which…
The Oceans Are Going to Rise—but When?
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In May 2014, NASA announced at a press…
Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers…
Physicists Create a Thermometer for Measuring ‘Quantumness’
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If there’s one law of physics that seems…
The ‘10 Martini’ Proof Connects Quantum Mechanics With Infinitely Intricate Mathematical Structures
But in some ways, the proof was a bit unsatisfying. Jitomirskaya and Avila had used a method that…
Distillation Can Make AI Models Smaller and Cheaper
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot…