Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study ...

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color ...

A new proof illuminates the hidden patterns that emerge when addition becomes impossible. The simplest ideas in mathematics can also be the most perplexing. Take addition. It’s a straightforward ...

Landmark results in geometry and number theory marked an exciting year for mathematics, at a time when advances in artificial intelligence are starting to transform the subject’s future.

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

Weighing in at a single ounce, the white-crowned sparrow can fly 2,600 miles, from Mexico to Alaska, on its annual spring migration, sometimes traveling 300 miles in a single night.Arctic terns make ...

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 process language could unlock deeper insights into ...

A pair of researchers has shown that trying to classify groups of numbers called “torsion-free abelian groups” is as hard as it can possibly be. The Quanta Newsletter ...

About the author Joseph Howlett is a math writer for Quanta Magazine. His articles have been published Scientific American, The San Francisco Chronicle and Gizmodo, among other places.He has a Ph.D.

Editor’s note: In February 2023, a team of physicists led by Norman Yao of Harvard University published a comment about the holographic wormhole experiment described in this article. After analyzing ...

The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz interviews leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time.

When Rosemary and Peter Grant first set foot on Daphne Major, a tiny island in the Galápagos archipelago, in 1973, they had no idea it would become a second home. The husband and wife team, now ...