quanta magazine

A dense rainforest or other verdant terrestrial vegetation may be what first comes to mind at the mention of photosynthesis. Yet the clouds of phytoplankton that fill the oceans are the…

Meanwhile, Hanna’s team in Israel was growing mouse embryo models in a similar way, as they described in a paper in Cell that was published shortly before the paper from Zernicka-Goetz’s…

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 pixel that has nonzero value (and is not just blank).…

The tiny foragers are also “remarkable learners” that can remember something after a single exposure to it, Crossley said. In the new study, the researchers peered deep into the snails’…

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 him that the only…

Human olfactory receptors belong to an enormous family of proteins known as G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Situated within cell membranes, these proteins contribute to a vast array of…

During fleeting fits, the sun occasionally hurls a colossal amount of energy into space. Called solar flares, these eruptions last for mere minutes, and they can trigger catastrophic…

Despite the wild success of ChatGPT and other large language models, the artificial neural networks (ANNs) that underpin these systems might be on the wrong track.For one, ANNs are “super…

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 study a single paper over a…

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 appear to have. “First I thought I was…