A Celebrated Cryptography-Breaking Algorithm Just Got an Upgrade
This is a job for LLL: Give it (or its brethren) a basis of a multidimensional lattice, and it’ll spit out a better one. This process is known as lattice …
quanta magazine
How to Guarantee the Safety of Autonomous Vehicles
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two …
Scientists Just Discovered a New Type of Magnetism
“The very reason that we have magnetism in our everyday lives is because of the strength of electron exchange interactions,” said study coauthor Ataç İmamoğlu, a physicist also at the …
Cryptographers Are Getting Closer to Enabling Fully Private Internet Searches
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. We all know to be careful about the details we share online, but the information we seek can also be …
During Pregnancy, the Placenta Hacks the Immune System to Protect the Fetus
“The cell is effectively dressing up as an infectious agent,” Kagan said. “The result is that it convinces itself that it’s infected, and then operates as such.” Simmering Immunity Immune …
These Rogue Worlds Upend the Theory of How Planets Form
“We know from direct imaging searches of young stars that very few stars have giant planets in [wide] orbits,” Bate said. “It is difficult to accept that there were many large …
The Tantalizing Mystery of the Solar System’s Hidden Oceans
-copy.jpg "The Tantalizing Mystery of the Solar System’s Hidden Oceans")
And yet, defiantly, these alien seas remain liquid. A Mirror-Wrapped Ocean Scientists suspect that a handful of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn—and maybe even some spinning around Uranus and Neptune—harbor …
Biophysicists Uncover Powerful Symmetries in Living Tissue
“It was pretty amazing how well the experimental data and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert said. In fact, it matched so closely that Carenza’s first response was that it must be …
An Invisible ‘Demon’ Lurks in an Odd Superconductor
A few years ago, the researchers decided to put a superconducting metal called strontium ruthenate in their crosshairs. Its structure is similar to that of a mysterious class of copper-based …
Starquakes Might Solve the Mysteries of Stellar Magnetism
-copy.jpg "Starquakes Might Solve the Mysteries of Stellar Magnetism")
That was a surprise—and a possible indication that something crucial was missing in those models: magnetism. Stellar Symmetry Last year, Gang Li, an asteroseismologist now at KU Leuven, went digging …