A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the...
Tag : quanta magazine
In a Fierce Desert, Microbe ‘Crusts’ Show How Life Tamed the Land
At first glance, the grit crust could seem like a routine example of what researchers call a biological soil crust, or “biocrust”—a community of coexisting...
Is It Real or Imagined? Here’s How Your Brain Tells the Difference
What is clear is that the brain must be able to accurately regulate how strong a mental image is to avoid confusion between fantasy and...
A Novel Type of Neural Network Comes to the Aid of Big Physics
Graham tried tweaking the CNN approach so that the kernel would only be placed on 3-by-3 sections of the image that contain at least one...
A Computer-Assisted Proof Solves the ‘Packing Coloring’ Problem
Heule, however, found the discovery of past results invigorating. It demonstrated that other researchers found the problem important enough to work on, and confirmed for...
Mathematicians Find Hidden Structure in a Common Type of Space
In the fall of 2017, Mehtaab Sawhney, then an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined a graduate reading group that set out to...
The Quest to Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy out of Nothing
Hotta found, to his surprise, that a simple sequence of events could, in fact, induce the quantum vacuum to go negative—giving up energy it didn’t...
How Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities
It’s a radical view of quantum behavior that many physicists take seriously. “I consider it completely real,” said Richard MacKenzie, a physicist at the University...
Gene Expression in Neurons Solves a Brain Evolution Puzzle
The neocortex stands out as a stunning achievement of biological evolution. All mammals have this swath of tissue covering their brain, and the six layers...
No, the James Webb Space Telescope Hasn’t Broken Cosmology
The cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last spring,...