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Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself.

At first, scientists thought Earth’s water came from comets. Then, asteroids. Now, they wonder if Earth’s water is homegrown. The post Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Robin George AndrewsJun 12, 2026

Quanta Magazine

What’s the Future of Gene Editing?

In the first episode of the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses how she discovered CRISPR’s genome-editing power, the breakthroughs and hurdles during its explosive growth, and what lies ahead for this groundbreaking technology. The post What’s the Future of Gene Editing? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Janna Levin and Steven StrogatzJun 11, 2026

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An Early Step on the Long, Strange Road to Photosynthesis

An ancient lineage of cyanobacteria is helping biologists uncover an early evolutionary stage of the mind-boggling process that turns light into life. The post An Early Step on the Long, Strange Road to Photosynthesis first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Carrie ArnoldJun 10, 2026

Quanta Magazine

How Terry Tao Became an Evangelist for AI in Math

With automated proof-checkers, a problem can be broken up into small chunks, solved bit-by-bit, then reassembled with confidence that every piece is correct. For some, this heralds a new area in mathematical research. The post How Terry Tao Became an Evangelist for AI in Math first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Kevin HartnettJun 8, 2026

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More Conversations, Complex Questions, and Bold Ideas in Season Five of ‘The Joy of Why’

The podcast returns with 12 all-new episodes that explore the biggest questions in basic science and mathematics. The post More Conversations, Complex Questions, and Bold Ideas in Season Five of ‘The Joy of Why’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Simon FrantzJun 4, 2026

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Plasmid, Virus or Other? DNA ‘Borgs’ Blur Boundaries. | Quanta Magazine

Scientists have reported large DNA structures in some archaea that defy easy categorization.

Jul 21, 20218 min read

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How to Find Rational Points Like Your Job Depends on It | Quanta Magazine

Using high school algebra and geometry, and knowing just one rational point on a circle or elliptic curve, we can locate infinitely many others.

Jul 22, 202115 min read

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The ‘Weirdest’ Matter, Made of Partial Particles, Defies Description | Quanta Magazine

Theorists are in a frenzy over “fractons,” bizarre, but potentially useful, hypothetical particles that can only move in combination with one another.

Jul 26, 20217 min read

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A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change | Quanta Magazine

A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects.

Jul 27, 202114 min read

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Proof Assistant Makes Jump to Big-League Math | Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians using the computer program Lean have verified the accuracy of a difficult theorem at the cutting edge of research mathematics.

Jul 28, 20217 min read

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Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real | Quanta Magazine

Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.

Jul 30, 202113 min read

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Mating Contests Among Females, Long Ignored, May Shape Evolution | Quanta Magazine

Showy male competitions over mating privileges have grabbed scientists’ attention more often, but new work hints that sexual selection is also widespread among females.

Aug 2, 202113 min read

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Galois Groups and the Symmetries of Polynomials | Quanta Magazinee

By focusing on relationships between solutions to polynomial equations, rather than the exact solutions themselves, Évariste Galois changed the course of modern mathematics.

Aug 3, 20218 min read

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Neither Star nor Planet: A Strange Brown Dwarf Puzzles Astronomers | Quanta Magazine

Brown dwarfs such as “The Accident” are illuminating the murky borderlands that separate planets from stars.

Aug 4, 20216 min read

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Mathematicians Solve Decades-Old Classification Problem | Quanta Magazine

A pair of researchers has shown that trying to classify groups of numbers called “torsion-free abelian groups” is as hard as it can possibly be.

Aug 5, 202112 min read

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Animals Can Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go? | Quanta Magazine

Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

Aug 9, 202117 min read

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Turing Patterns Turn Up in a Tiny Crystal | Quanta Magazine

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale.

Aug 10, 20215 min read

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How Steven Weinberg Transformed Physics and Physicists | Quanta Magazine

When Steven Weinberg died last month, the world lost one of its most profound thinkers.

Aug 11, 20218 min read

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Physicists Create a Bizarre ‘Wigner Crystal’ Made Purely of Electrons | Quanta Magazine

The unambiguous discovery of a Wigner crystal relied on a novel technique for probing the insides of complex materials.

Aug 12, 20215 min read

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How Do New Organs Evolve? A Beetle Gland Shows the Way. | Quanta Magazine

The evolution of a defensive gland in beetles shows how organs can arise from novel cells carving out new functional niches for their neighbors.

Aug 16, 202112 min read

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Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Major Research Algorithm | Quanta Magazine

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem.

Aug 17, 20217 min read

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How Big Can the Quantum World Be? Physicists Probe the Limits. | Quanta Magazine

By showing that even large objects can exhibit bizarre quantum behaviors, physicists hope to illuminate the mystery of quantum collapse, identify the quantum nature of gravity, and perhaps even make…

Aug 18, 202115 min read

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How Big Data Carried Graph Theory Into New Dimensions | Quanta Magazine

Researchers are turning to the mathematics of higher-order interactions to better model the complex connections within their data.

Aug 19, 202112 min read

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This Physicist Discovered an Escape From Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox | Quanta Magazine

The five-decade-old paradox — long thought key to linking quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of gravity — is falling to a new generation of thinkers. Netta Engelhardt is leading the way.

Aug 23, 202114 min read

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Mental Phenomena Don’t Map Into the Brain as Expected | Quanta Magazine

Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are…

Aug 24, 202113 min read

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Math Can, in Theory, Help You Escape a Hungry Bear | Quanta Magazine

How readers used their geometry skills to survive a dangerous puzzle.

Aug 25, 202120 min read

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Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning | Quanta Magazine

One of the strangest results in mathematics explains how it’s possible to turn one sphere into two identical copies, simply by rearranging its pieces.

Aug 26, 20218 min read

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To Learn More Quickly, Brain Cells Break Their DNA | Quanta Magazine

New work shows that neurons and other brain cells use DNA double-strand breaks, often associated with cancer, neurodegeneration and aging, to quickly express genes related to learning and memory.

Aug 30, 20217 min read

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The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks | Quanta Magazine

Investigations of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations — as well as insights into the nature of time itself.

Aug 31, 202110 min read

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The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’ | Quanta Magazine

Genomes hold immense quantities of noncoding DNA. Some of it is essential for life, some seems useless, and some has its own agenda.

Sep 1, 20217 min read