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

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

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

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

Two new notions of infinity challenge a long-standing plan to define the mathematical universe.

Mathematicians long wondered whether it’s possible to express the number 33 as the sum of three cubes — that is, whether the equation 33 = x ³+ y ³+ z ³ has a solution. They knew that 29 could be ...

All animals, plants, fungi and protists — which collectively make up the domain of life called eukaryotes — have genomes with a peculiar feature that has puzzled researchers for almost half a century: ...

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.

Using machine learning, string theorists are finally showing how microscopic configurations of extra dimensions translate into sets of elementary particles — though not yet those of our universe.

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 ...

Supermassive black holes emit jets of white-hot plasma that stretch thousands of light-years across the cosmos. For the first time, researchers have identified what’s creating these jets.

Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one ...