A healthy brain maintains a harmony of neurons that excite or inhibit other neurons, but the lines between different types of ...

In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: eight ...

Naomi Saphra thinks that most research into language models focuses too much on the finished product. She’s mining the ...

Two mathematicians have proved that a straightforward question — how hard is it to untie a knot? — has a complicated answer.

Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta Magazine guides you through basic climate science — from quantum effects to ancient hothouses, from ...

Nearly 170 years ago, a scientist named Eunice Foote discovered a fundamental truth about the gases that surround us. In her home laboratory in New York, she filled one glass cylinder with carbon ...

The Earth’s atmosphere is nothing but freely roaming molecules. Left alone, they would drift and collide, and eventually even out into a mixture that’s dynamic, yet stable and broadly unchanging. The ...

In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out to investigate the potential future of a planet on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. He started by looking some 600 ...

Earth’s radiation can send some molecules spinning or vibrating, which is what makes them greenhouse gases. This infographic explains how relatively few heat-trapping molecules can have a planetary ...

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules. Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on ...