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.

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.

In the early 2000s, computer scientists showed how to do just that, contriving interactive proof protocols that were specifically designed to fail when they underwent Fiat-Shamir. But “nobody in their ...

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that enter your nose and the individual neurons that translate them into ...

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.

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

Charlie Wood is a staff writer covering physics at Quanta Magazine. His articles about advances in the physical sciences both on and off the planet have appeared in Popular Science… ...

A new proof represents the culmination of a 65-year-old story about anomalous shapes in special dimensions.

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

Modern thinking machines owe their existence to insights from the physics of complex materials.