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
Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size entities anchored to the core-mantle boundary might be involved. #science #geophysics #earthscience Read more at Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/earths-core-appears-to-be-leaking-up-and-out-of-earths-surface-20250804/ Associated papers: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08322-y, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09003-0 ——— Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent publication supported byContinue Reading
A powerful new proof extends the late Maryam Mirzakhani’s work on hyperbolic surfaces, showing that most of them have an important geometric property. The result greatly advances our understanding of these exotic shapes. Associated paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12268 Read more at Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/years-after-the-early-death-of-a-math-genius-her-ideas-gain-new-life-20250303/ #science #mathematics #geometry ——– Quanta Magazine is anContinue Reading
In this special live recording from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, July 2026, the central question discussed was what do mathematicians really value about doing mathematics in the first place? “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematicianContinue Reading
A group of international studies comparing brain development in birds and mammals suggests that vertebrate intelligence evolved independently, multiple times. Despite the differences in the brain structures in birds and mammals, the separate evolutionary paths converged on a similar form of functional intelligence. Original Papers: “Constrained roads to complex brains”Continue Reading
Mathematician Lauren Williams tells The Joy of Why how studying a fundamental object in algebraic combinatorics led to a career full of surprises. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and authorContinue Reading
The mathematicians Yu Deng, Zaher Hani, and Xiao Ma solved a major piece of David Hilbert’s Sixth Problem, a 125-year-old challenge to place physics on a rigorous mathematical foundation. Their breakthrough explains how countless colliding molecules give rise to the smooth equations of fluid dynamics, helping earn Deng the 2026Continue Reading
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
Jonathan Halliwell explains how quantum decoherence is key to understanding how we transition from a world with a wave-like nature of matter and energy to the classical macroscopic world that we’re used to. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. TheContinue 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
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