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3 weeks ago | 
share.google | Conor Feehly |Molly Herring |Elizabeth Landau |Zack Savitsky
Introduction You’ve just gotten home from an exhausting day. All you want to do is put your feet up and zone out to whatever is on television. Though the inactivity may feel like a well-earned rest, your brain is not just chilling. In fact, it is using nearly as much energy as it did during your stressful activity, according to recent research.
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3 weeks ago | 
buff.ly | Conor Feehly |Gabriel Popkin |Molly Herring |Janna Levin
Introduction You’ve just gotten home from an exhausting day. All you want to do is put your feet up and zone out to whatever is on television. Though the inactivity may feel like a well-earned rest, your brain is not just chilling. In fact, it is using nearly as much energy as it did during your stressful activity, according to recent research.
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Jan 29, 2025 | 
quantamagazine.org | Asher Elbein |Yasemin Saplakoglu |Veronique Greenwood |Molly Herring
Introduction Most of life’s engines run on sunlight. Photons filter down through the atmosphere and are eagerly absorbed by light-powered organisms such as plants and algae. Through photosynthesis, the particles of light power a cellular reaction that manufactures chemical energy (in the form of sugars), which is then passed around the food web in a complex dance of herbivores, predators, scavengers, decomposers and more. On a bright, sunny day, there’s a wealth of photons to go around.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
quantamagazine.org | Yasemin Saplakoglu |Veronique Greenwood |Molly Herring |Hannah Waters
Introduction Imagine you’re on a first date, sipping a martini at a bar. You eat an olive and patiently listen to your date tell you about his job at a bank. Your brain is processing this scene, in part, by breaking it down into concepts. Bar. Date. Martini. Olive. Bank. Deep in your brain, neurons known as concept cells are firing. You might have concept cells that fire for martinis but not for olives. Or ones that fire for bars — perhaps even that specific bar, if you’ve been there before.
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
quantamagazine.org | Veronique Greenwood |Molly Herring |Hannah Waters |Steven Strogatz
Introduction Prochlorococcus bacteria are so small that you’d have to line up around a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are likely the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet, and they create a significant portion — 10% to 20% — of the atmosphere’s oxygen. That means that life on Earth depends on the roughly 3 octillion (or 3 × 1027) tiny individual cells toiling away.
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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.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Molly Herring
4 hours agoBelieve it or not, Earth has a "mini-moon" that's sticking around for the next few months. Sometimes, life really does resemble a science fiction movie. For the past couple of weeks, Earth's orbit has been home to a "mini-moon" the size of a city bus. The celestial object is more than just a guest …
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Molly Herring |Janna Levin |Yasemin Saplakoglu
Introduction Three billion years ago, life on Earth was simple. Single-celled organisms ruled, and there wasn’t much to them. They were what we now call prokaryotic cells, which include modern-day bacteria and archaea, essentially sacks of loose molecular parts. They swirled together in shallow, primordial brews or near deep-sea ocean vents, where they extracted energy from the environment and reproduced by dividing one cell into two daughter cells.
