Molly Herring

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.