In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ...

Explore Quanta’s artificial intelligence coverage.AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can ...

How does a cell know when it’s been damaged? A molecular alarm, set off by mutated RNA and colliding ribosomes, signals ...

It can be hard to tell, at first, when a cell is on the verge of self-destruction. It appears to be going about its usual business, transcribing genes and making proteins. The powerhouse organelles ...

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a ...

Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces and pressures inside a subatomic particle for the first time.

Find your favorite Quanta books, apparel and more for you and the science or math people in your life.

Recent observations of an aging, alien planetary system are helping to answer the question: What will happen to our planet when the sun dies?

Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates something out of nothing.

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.