quantamagazine.org
Every quantamagazine.org story we have translated and published, newest first. · 44 stories
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How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole?
Astrophysicist Shep Doeleman explains how capturing the first image of a black hole required a telescope the size of the world, and why the
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How Spiders Spin ‘Silk Dope’ Into Nature’s Toughest Material
By probing its molecular structure, biologists are uncovering how a tangle of unstructured proteins turns into a tough, flexible thread. The
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How Voting Is Like a Klein Bottle
A new topological model connects a centuries-old voting paradox to a surface with no distinct inside or outside. The post How Voting Is Like
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Malaria Parasite Caught in the Act of Breaking and Entering
To invade red blood cells, the deadly protist creates a temporary molecular portal that disappears behind it — a door we can now see in fine
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See Inside Cells Like Never Before in These Vivid Microscopic Images
Winning entries in the 2026 Nikon Small World competitions reveal the hidden interactions that govern everyday life. The post See Inside Cel
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AI Proved the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis. What Happens Now?
Unlike other recent AI proofs, this one has been unpacked by human experts. The implications, one mathematician said, are “staggering.” The
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He Wants AI Benchmarking To Be a Science, Not a Dark Art
Moritz Hardt, author of a new book on benchmarks, believes these “standardized tests” for artificial intelligence are fundamentally broken —
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How Do Fungi Keep the Planet Healthy?
Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers explains how fungal networks in soil trade nutrients with plants, help keep carbon underground, and strike
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Triplet of ‘Ghostly’ Galaxies Hints at What Dark Matter Is — and Isn’t
A collision may have left these galaxies without dark matter. That spells trouble for alternative gravity theories. The post Triplet of ‘Gho
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Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence?
A mathematical mechanism enables AI models to process language at scale, undergirding the current AI revolution. Our columnist asks: Why is
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How Does Life Unfold? A Landscape Metaphor Comes Into Its Own.
C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. Expe
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As AI Closed In on ‘Unique Games’ Proof, Researchers Raced to Beat the Machines
In the shadow of a rumored AI proof of one of the biggest problems in their field, three computer scientists rushed to publish their own mil
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Is AI the End of Math As We Know It?
Mathematicians are facing the sudden shift with grief, anger, and a desperate search for fresh ideas: “If we don’t adapt, there’s just no mo
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Sea Monkeys Show Scientists How To Rewrite a Rule of Turbulence
Scientists assumed that energy flows in only one direction in a turbulent system. What they didn’t know, until they looked closely at brine
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What Does the Fourth Dimension Actually Look Like?
Maggie Miller explains why our intuition about three dimensions breaks down in four, and how she visualizes 4D spaces as a reel of three-dim
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Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain’s Inner Workings
Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time. The post Surprisingly Complex Waves Reve
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Mathematicians Harness Randomness To Crack a 55-Year-Old Conjecture
After a long hiatus, the problem, which was likely inspired by juggling, has finally been resolved by a group of young mathematicians. The p
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Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality?
The biggest breakthrough in modern theoretical physics is the discovery that gravity can collapse the dimensions of space. Physicists don’t
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Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Scientists have a history of trying — and failing — to link biology and quantum mechanics. The real connection between them may be in the ma
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How Virus-like ‘Jumping Genes’ Became Our Partners in Evolution
Half of our genome is made of transposons — snips of DNA that can move and copy themselves. But they’re more than parasites or genetic junk.
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Mathematicians Build Long-Awaited Graph Sandwich
The proof of a decades-old conjecture has given researchers a new way to understand complex networks. The post Mathematicians Build Long-Awa
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Where Does the Quantum World End and Ours Begin?
Jonathan Halliwell explains how quantum decoherence is key to understanding how we transition from a world with a wave-like nature of matter
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Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders.
Comb jellies are helping answer fundamental questions in biology, from how the earliest nervous systems evolved to how bioluminescence works
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Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope’s ‘Little Red Dots.’
The James Webb Space Telescope spots mysterious “little red dots” everywhere. A bold new theory suggests they’re suns dozens of times larger
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