Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can later withstand immense forces.

Innovations in imaging and genetic engineering are coming together to probe the biophysics of cytoplasm inside living animals.

An exploration of how mathematicians are still renovating and rebuilding the core pillars of their field today.

In October 2008, Chris Bretherton lifted off from the coast of northern Chile in a C-130 turboprop plane. It was too dark to see the sandy hills of the Atacama Desert below, but the darkness suited ...

Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others.

Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent online publication launched by the Simons Foundation in 2012 to enhance public understanding of science. Why Quanta? Albert Einstein called photons ...

Every Tuesday, editor in chief Samir Patel sits down with writers and editors to discuss our most thought-provoking stories in science and math. Audio editions of Quanta’s stories with Susan Valot ...

New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is. Some 4 billion ...

It’s simple enough for AI to seem to comprehend data, but devising a true test of a machine’s knowledge has proved difficult. But has GPT-3 — trained on text from thousands of websites, books and ...

Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.

Is the universe infinite, Aristotle asked in 350 BCE, “or is this an impossibility? The decision … is … all-important to our search for the truth.” The Greek ...

Spin glasses might turn out to be the most useful useless things ever discovered. These materials — which are typically made of metal, not glass — exhibit puzzling behaviors that captivated a small ...