Every Tuesday, editor in chief Samir Patel sits down with writers and editors to discuss our most thought-provoking stories in science and math. Audio editions of Quanta’s stories with Susan Valot ...

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that ...

Jenna Ahart is a science journalist specializing in the physical sciences. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Science, MIT Technology Review, and Live Science. She studied journalism ...

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses.

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study ...

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color ...

The work demonstrates the important role of experimentation and play in research mathematics. It also has potential practical applications, such as in the design of self-righting spacecraft. “I didn’t ...

Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius ...

AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can process language could unlock deeper insights into ...