How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick?
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For a pathogen to make us sick, it must overcome a lot. First it has to enter the body, bypassing …
quanta magazine
The Milky Way’s Stars Reveal Its Turbulent Past
To make maps of these structures, astronomers turn to individual stars. Each star’s composition records its birthplace, age, and natal ingredients, so studying starlight enables a form of galactic cartography—as …
The JWST Has Spotted Giant Black Holes All Over the Early Universe
Like any object, black holes take time to grow and form. And like a 6-foot-tall toddler, Fan’s supersize black holes were too big for their age—the universe wasn’t old enough …
Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking
Turing’s diagonalization proof is a version of this game where the questions run through the infinite list of possible algorithms, repeatedly asking, “Can this algorithm solve the problem we’d like …
This Contest Put Theories of Consciousness to the Test. Here’s What It Really Proved
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Science routinely puts forward theories, then batters them with data till only one is left standing. In the fledgling science …
Magnetic Minerals May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry
Naaman and his team discovered that chiral molecules filter electrons based on the direction of their spin. Electrons with one spin orientation will move more efficiently across a chiral molecule …
How These Nobel-Winning Physicists Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. …
How Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like …
The Secret of How Cells Make ‘Dark Oxygen’ Without Light
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with …
A New Proof Moves the Needle on a Sticky Geometry Problem
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in …