The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even ...

The effects of insufficient water are felt by every cell in the body, but it’s the brain that manifests our experience of ...

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the ...

Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size ...

A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is ...

Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist.

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 ...

A new proof has debunked a conspiracy that mathematicians feared might haunt the number line. In doing so, it has given them another set of tools for understanding arithmetic’s fundamental building ...

In 1891, when the German biologist Hans Driesch split two-cell sea urchin embryos in half, he found that each of the separated cells then gave rise to its own complete, albeit smaller, larva. Somehow, ...