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1 week ago | 
quantamagazine.org | Anil Ananthaswamy |Ben Brubaker |Webb Wright |Janna Levin
Language isn’t always necessary. While it certainly helps in getting across certain ideas, some neuroscientists have argued that many forms of human thought and reasoning don’t require the medium of words and grammar. Sometimes, the argument goes, having to turn ideas into language actually slows down the thought process. Now there’s intriguing evidence that certain artificial intelligence systems could also benefit from “thinking” independently of language.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
quantamagazine.org | Charlie Wood |Henry Carnell |Janna Levin |Natalie Wolchover
Introduction Sunlight melts snowflakes. Fire turns logs into soot and smoke. A hot oven will make a magnet lose its pull. Physicists know from countless examples that if you crank the temperature high enough, structures and patterns break down. Now, though, they’ve cooked up a striking exception.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
quantamagazine.org | Henry Carnell |Janna Levin |Natalie Wolchover |Zack Savitsky
Introduction Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter Higgs first proposed the existence of the Higgs boson; nearly 50 years later, the particle was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider. Hadronization is different.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Zack Savitsky |Henry Carnell |Janna Levin |Natalie Wolchover
Introduction Life is an anthology of destruction. Everything you build eventually breaks. Everyone you love will die. Any sense of order or stability inevitably crumbles. The entire universe follows a dismal trek toward a dull state of ultimate turmoil. To keep track of this cosmic decay, physicists employ a concept called entropy.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Charlie Wood |Henry Carnell |Janna Levin |Natalie Wolchover
Introduction This year, superconductivity — the flow of electric current with zero resistance — was discovered in three distinct materials. Two instances stretch the textbook understanding of the phenomenon. The third shreds it completely. “It’s an extremely unusual form of superconductivity that a lot of people would have said is not possible,” said Ashvin Vishwanath, a physicist at Harvard University who was not involved in the discoveries.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Steven Strogatz |Yasemin Saplakoglu |Janna Levin |Jonathan Lambert
Introduction Death might seem like a pure loss, the disappearance of what makes a living thing distinct from everything else on our planet. But zoom in closer, to the cellular level, and it takes on a different, more nuanced meaning. There is a challenge in simply defining what makes an individual cell alive or dead. Scientists today are working to understand the various ways and reasons that cells disappear, and what these processes mean to biological systems.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Yasemin Saplakoglu |Janna Levin |Jonathan Lambert
Introduction Bacteria are in, around and all over us. They thrive in almost every corner of the planet, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to high up in the clouds, to the crevices of your ears, mouth, nose and gut. But scientists have long assumed that bacteria can’t survive in the human brain. The powerful blood-brain barrier, the thinking goes, keeps the organ mostly free from outside invaders. But are we sure that a healthy human brain doesn’t have a microbiome of its own?
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Janna Levin |Jonathan Lambert |Molly Herring
Introduction It’s fair to say that enjoyment of a podcast would be severely limited without the human capacity to create and understand speech. That capacity has often been cited as a defining characteristic of our species, and one that sets us apart in the long history of life on Earth. Yet we know that other species communicate in complex ways.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Jonathan Lambert |Janna Levin |Molly Herring
Introduction If you follow any path of ancestry back far enough, you’ll reach the same single point. Whether you begin with gorillas or ginkgo trees or bacteria that live deep in the bowels of the Earth — or yourself, for that matter — all roads lead to LUCA, the “last universal common ancestor.” This ancient, single-celled organism (or, possibly, population of single-celled organisms) was the progenitor of every varied form that makes a life for itself on our planet today.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Molly Herring |Janna Levin |Yasemin Saplakoglu
Introduction Say you live in an old house, and you want to make a slew of renovations; at some point, the most efficient way forward is to build a new house altogether. A similar clean-slate approach is the guiding principle behind an international effort to create the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic genome — the set of molecular instructions that govern complex life on Earth, including humans.
