Quanta Magazine

Deep in a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park resides a bacterium that does what life really shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time. @buehlersciwri reports: quantamagazine.org/the-cells-that…

Einstein’s general theory of relativity falls apart when space-time is not sufficiently smooth. Mathematicians are developing new geometric methods to get around this impasse. quantamagazine.org/a-new-geometry…

OK, so you got sunburned. Badly. What happens next? “The [cell’s] decision to live or die is made in 15 to 30 minutes,” said RNA researcher Niladri Sinh. quantamagazine.org/rna-is-the-cel…

It took more than 20 years for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to detect its first gravitational wave. Had AI’s insights been available when it was being built, “we would have had something like 10 or 15% better LIGO sensitivity all along,” said physicist…

As weird as it sounds, infinity comes in many shapes and sizes. Mathematicians study these different notions of infinity to understand the limits of mathematical logic. Tune in to this week’s episode of The Quanta Podcast. Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/is-… Spotify:…

The field of AI is utilizing the handy technique of distillation to make smaller and cheaper neural networks. quantamagazine.org/how-distillati…

Artificial intelligence software is designing novel experimental protocols that work better than human physicists’, although the humans are still “doing a lot of baby-sitting.” @anilananth reports: quantamagazine.org/ai-comes-up-wi…

The molecular biologist Anna Vind recently discovered that when a mammal's skin gets sunburned, RNA is at the center of the action. Ribosomes are slowed by damaged RNA, triggering a rapid and intricate damage response. quantamagazine.org/rna-is-the-cel…

Distillation is becoming an essential technique across the field of artificial intelligence. quantamagazine.org/how-distillati…

Have you ever found yourself writhing in sunburnt misery? Here’s what’s happening to your cells. quantamagazine.org/rna-is-the-cel…

A fundamental technique in AI lets researchers transfer knowledge from a large, expensive “teacher” model to a smaller, cheaper “student” model. quantamagazine.org/how-distillati…

The universe is not always smooth. At the centers of black holes, for instance, the math of space-time falls apart. New geometric tools might help reckon with this reality. quantamagazine.org/a-new-geometry…

Dark matter warps light. This map, made with digital tools in the late 1990s, shows dark matter (depicted in orange) smoothly concentrated near the center of the CL0024 galaxy cluster. Contour lines indicate step changes in density. quantamagazine.org/the-biggest-ev…

How can AI companies like DeepSeek “distill” the knowledge of a larger training model into a smaller one? The method has deep roots in computer science. @stettosun reports: quantamagazine.org/how-distillati…

The mathematicians Clemens Sämann and Michael Kunzinger helped prove that singularity theorems, rooted in general relativity, hold up even in models of space-time that are not smooth. “We believe non-smoothness is an inescapable part of the natural world.”…

A trio of mathematicians has built the first “monostable” tetrahedron, a shape that will always flip-flop onto the same face no matter what side you place it on. In order for it to work properly, it had to be engineered to a level of precision within one-tenth of a gram and…

A recent sphere-packing record has reunited two areas of math that had drifted apart over the past several decades. quantamagazine.org/new-sphere-pac…

Public key cryptography makes digital signatures possible: They create mathematical proof that a message was generated by the holder of a private key. quantamagazine.org/how-public-key…

How do you prove a lie? Computer scientists are figuring out how to override some of the internet’s toughest digital encryption schemes. quantamagazine.org/computer-scien…

☀️ When the sun shines on your skin, what does it hit? When it causes a sunburn, what went wrong? quantamagazine.org/rna-is-the-cel…