quantamagazine.org
Every quantamagazine.org story we have translated and published, newest first. · 30 stories
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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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Why Do These Fossil Shells Flip Their Spirals Every Few Millennia?
The mystery of the flipping foraminifera may conceal a rarely observed evolutionary process playing out across the planet. The post Why Do T
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The Four-Color Theorem Gets a Rare New Proof
By revisiting the famous problem — which was controversially solved in the 1970s with the help of computers — mathematicians have gained imp
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What Is Math’s Mysterious Langlands Program Really About?
Hidden correspondences hint at a deeper structure to the mathematical universe. Our columnist unpacks one of those connections and asks math
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AI Has Solved One of Math’s $1 Million Millennium Prize Problems
Mathematicians at OpenAI showed that the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe how fluids flow, can sometimes “blow up.” But the massive r
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Live from ICM 2026: What Is Math For in the Age of AI?
In this special live recording from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, July 2026, the central question discussed
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In an Age of AI, a Physicist Seeks What Endures
Sarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees the potential for large language models to both help and harm her fie
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Genome Duplication Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble
By doubling their entire genome, organisms can evolve extremely rapidly — or they can lose it all. New studies reveal how to survive the hig
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‘Stunning’ Percolation Proof Solves Decades-Old Puzzle About Phase Transitions
Mathematicians found that a broad class of networks will abruptly shift behavior past a critical point. The post ‘Stunning’ Percolation Proo
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‘Stunning’ Percolation Proof Solves Decades-Old Puzzle About Phase Transitions
Mathematicians found that a broad class of networks will abruptly shift behavior past a critical point. The post ‘Stunning’ Percolation Proo
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Does Computer Science Need Computers?
The theoretical side of the field doesn’t require computing machines. But many questions would never have been posed without them. The post
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In Hilbert Space, All Things Are Quantumly Possible
To explore quantum phenomena, we must leave the familiar world and enter the abstract realm of Hilbert space. The post In Hilbert Space, All
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A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World
An updated view of categorization reflects the modern understanding that the nervous system is more of a prediction engine than a filing cab
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‘Huge Breakthrough’ in the Math of Imbalance
For the first time in 30 years, computer scientists have found a better way to allocate objects evenly between two groups. The post ‘Huge Br
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Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence?
Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create bet
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