Category: Quantum Stuff

Along the murky bottom of the Amazon River, serpentine fish called electric eels scour the gloom for unwary frogs or other small prey. When one swims by, the fish unleash two 600-volt pulses of electricity to stun or kill it. This high-voltage hunting tactic is distinctive, but a handful of other fish species also use… Continue reading Electric Fish Genomes Reveal How Evolution Repeats Itself

Anthony Fauci, who has been the top infectious-diseases adviser in the United States for almost 40 years, announced on 22 August that he would resign from his leadership roles in December. Although many scientists are saddened to be losing his guidance, they understand his desire to step down. No other federal scientist has held a… Continue reading Scientists Reflect on Anthony Fauci’s Impact

To Martin Rees, the United Kingdom’s Astronomer Royal, AGN feedback offered a natural way to connect the relatively tiny black hole to the galaxy at large. Two decades earlier, in the 1970s, Rees correctly hypothesized that supermassive black holes power the luminous jets observed in some far-off, brightly glowing galaxies called quasars. He even proposed,… Continue reading What Drives Galaxies? The Milky Way’s Black Hole May Be the Key.

In the summer of 1996 a small group of people met in northern California to share their experiences with intersex variations. One participant, Heidi Walcutt, said that doctors surgically reduced her clitoris as a young child “to more closely approximate a normal female appearance.”  This resulted in nerve damage that would blunt sexual sensation later… Continue reading How Medicine’s Fixation on the Sex Binary Harms Intersex People

Say two parties, Alice and Bob, want to exchange a message in secret, even under the watchful gaze of a potential attacker. They begin with a collection of points connected by edges called a graph. Each point represents a different elliptic curve. If you can transform one curve into another in a particular way (via… Continue reading ‘Post-Quantum’ Cryptography Scheme Is Cracked on a Laptop

Explore Look down at the Pacific Ocean from outer space and it appears to take up most of the globe. That’s how vast it is. Come back down and onto a sailboat, this time in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Weeks from any shore, you could still be closer to the International Space Station… Continue reading It’s High Time to Protect Our High Seas

Dreams are so personal, subjective and fleeting, they might seem impossible to study directly and with scientific objectivity. But in recent decades, laboratories around the world have developed sophisticated techniques for getting into the minds of people while they are dreaming. In the process, they are learning more about why we need these strange nightly… Continue reading Why and How Do We Dream?

That said, you can’t simply look at the normal bundles of the individual lines and immediately translate that to an understanding of the normal bundle of the hyperbola. That’s because at the point where the two lines meet, the normal bundle misbehaves, in a sense. Instead, mathematicians have to study the normal bundle with certain… Continue reading Old Problem About Algebraic Curves Falls to Young Mathematicians

A sweltering mid-June day with temperatures topping 100 degrees spurred one of the largest livestock die-offs in recent Kansas history, killing about 2,000 cattle. Twice that many cattle perished in fierce 2011 Iowa heat, with thousands more dying in neighboring states. And a July 1995 heat wave took a similar toll in the Farm Belt.… Continue reading Putting Cows in Forests Could Prevent Heat-Related Losses

Quanta Magazine > 0; if (typeof predicate !== ‘function’) { throw new TypeError(‘predicate must be a function’); } var thisArg = arguments[1]; var k = 0; while (k We care about your data, and we’d like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.Agree… Continue reading A Biochemist’s View of Life’s Origin Reframes Cancer and Aging