In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

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

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

An Infinity of Infinities Yes, infinity comes in many sizes. In 1873, the German mathematician Georg Cantor shook math to the core when he discovered that the “real” numbers that fill the number line ...

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 ...

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… ...

One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science. AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns ...

His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences.

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 ...

Though they live only a few hours before dividing, bacteria can anticipate the approach of cold weather and prepare for it. The discovery suggests that seasonal tracking is fundamental to life.

Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results point to a new fundamental particle.