In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen ...

How does a cell know when it’s been damaged? A molecular alarm, set off by mutated RNA and colliding ribosomes, signals ...

Explore Quanta’s artificial intelligence coverage.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 ...

One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science. AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns ...

Charlie Wood is a staff writer covering physics at Quanta Magazine. His articles about advances in the physical sciences both on and off the planet have appeared in Popular Science… ...

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a ...

His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences.

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

The puzzling behavior of black hole interiors has led researchers to propose a new physical law: the second law of quantum complexity.

Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one ...