2+ hour ago  (1738+ words) When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. "I am quite a visual person," she said. "I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what's going on." Recent ideas suggest that little red dots could be…...

1+ day, 2+ hour ago  (1098+ words) Ada Zejun Shen/Quanta Magazine For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life. The lab-made synthetic cell grew, replicated its DNA,…...

3+ day, 2+ hour ago  (798+ words) As the mitotic spindle tightens to separate chromosomes during cell division, it produces and absorbs forces. Ada Zejun Shen/Quanta Magazine If absorbing those forces caused the spindle's integrity to fail, it could spell the end for both daughter cells…...

6+ day, 1+ hour ago  (1591+ words) Erd's" approach, known as the probabilistic method, was simple but revolutionary. Before its development, "if I"m telling you that certain objects exist, you would tell me, "Show me," said Benny Sudakov, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of…...

1+ week, 2+ hour ago  (1911+ words) Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tune In or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta. Note: Since this conversation was recorded, results from the First Proof Second Batch project were released on June 10, 2026. STEVE STROGATZ: All…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago  (525+ words) Seventy years ago, the physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines took a custom-built 10-ton detector, surrounded it with thick lead walls and wet sandbags, and placed it near a powerful nuclear reactor at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina....

1+ week, 3+ day ago  (1261+ words) Ada Zejun Shen/Quanta Magazine For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. According to current estimates, approximately 70% of the stuff that makes up the cosmos consists of dark energy, an…...

2+ week, 2+ hour ago  (1141+ words) Samuel Velasco and Hannah Waters/Quanta Magazine This approach is likely to be useful, but for those who crave real understanding of how the genome, and ultimately life itself, works, a computational black box will never suffice. And perhaps more…...

2+ week, 2+ hour ago  (1141+ words) Samuel Velasco and Hannah Waters/Quanta Magazine This approach is likely to be useful, but for those who crave real understanding of how the genome, and ultimately life itself, works, a computational black box will never suffice. And perhaps more…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago  (970+ words) The magician Noah Levine performs a riffle shuffle. Samuel Velasco and Chris Young/Quanta Magazine; all inset illustrations from The Expert at the Card Table by S. W. Erdnase. In 1992, mathematicians famously proved that seven "riffle shuffles" " the kind where a player…...