A decade ago, Karen Lloyd discovered single-celled microbes living beneath the seafloor. Now she studies how they can survive ...

The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even ...

The effects of insufficient water are felt by every cell in the body, but it’s the brain that manifests our experience of ...

For decades, mathematicians have struggled to understand matrices that reflect both order and randomness, like those that ...

Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

Explore Quanta’s machine learning coverage.AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can process ...

The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed. We’ve attempted to connect the proton’s ...

For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise.

In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking ...

Simple math can help scheming politicians manipulate district maps and cruise to victory. But it can also help identify and fix the problem.