One of the most contested issues in astrophysics is our understanding of the Universe’s expansion. Nobel laureate Adam Riess discusses why there is disagreement and what might resolve it. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author StevenContinue Reading
A host of recent research suggests that traits from a father’s lifestyle – such as diet, stress, and nicotine use – can be passed to his children via sperm. Now a new study on exercise offers the strongest evidence yet that the effect of environmental exposures are transmitted by RNAs,Continue Reading
Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologistContinue Reading
What would it actually take to find intelligent life in the universe — and how would we know when we saw it? Columbia University astronomer David Kipping weighs in on The Joy of Why podcast. Click the related link to listen now: https://youtu.be/-HoVx11GtIw In the full episode “Will We EverContinue Reading
When Hannah Cairo was a 17-year-old high school student, she did something mathematicians had been unable to do for four decades: she overturned the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a famous prediction about how wave energy behaves. In this video, Cairo and the mathematicians she worked with explain how she found the counterexampleContinue Reading
2025’s most surprising breakthroughs in biology included a finding that a father’s environmental exposures can impact the development of their offspring, research confirming that intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals, and a new mathematical model reveals that evolution happens in explosive bursts. 0:04 TWO PATH’S TO INTELLIGENCE A groupContinue Reading
What would it actually take to find intelligent life in the universe — and how would we know when we saw it? Columbia University astronomer David Kipping weighs in on The Joy of Why podcast. Click the related link to listen now: https://youtu.be/-HoVx11GtIw In the full episode “Will We EverContinue Reading
Hash tables are fundamental ways to store data and are used in every computer. Since the 1970s, researchers have assumed that no improvements could be made to hash table design. Enter Andrew Krapivin who, while an undergraduate, invented a new kind of hash table, overturning a major conjecture and aContinue Reading
Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses how she discovered CRISPR’s genome-editing power, the breakthroughs and hurdles during its explosive growth, and what lies ahead for this groundbreaking technology. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz andContinue Reading
The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos. Read more at Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rewrites-the-history-of-the-universe-20250912/ Associated paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21748 #physics #science #blackhole ——— Quanta Magazine is anContinue Reading
Quantum computers have long tantalized researchers but a useful one has remained out of reach. This is because qubits, the fundamental computational units of quantum computing, are finicky and error-prone. Now a team at Google Quantum AI has shown that scaling up quantum error correction using an approach called theContinue Reading
Astronomer David Kipping discusses why claims of extraterrestrial life keep dissolving under scrutiny, why we need a more statistically grounded approach to searching for life beyond Earth, and why it’s rational to believe that we may be alone. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity andContinue Reading
Neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor discusses efforts to understand how skin contact can be painful or pleasurable, and what touch-obsessed naked mole rats might teach us about human social behavior. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven StrogatzContinue Reading