Quanta

[:eu]Grand ideas have a way of turning up in unusual settings, far from an office or a chalkboard. Months ago, Quanta Magazine set out to photograph some of the world’s most accomplished scientists and mathematicians in their favorite places to think, tinker and create. This series explores the role of cherished spaces — public or…

[:eu]The British physicist and mathematician Sir Roger Penrose conjectured in 1969 that visible or “naked” singularities are actually forbidden from forming in nature, in a kind of cosmic censorship. But why should quantum gravity censor itself?[:]

[:eu]A different kind of dark matter could help to resolve an old celestial conundrum.[:]

[:eu]The computational immunologist Purvesh Khatri embraces messy data as a way to capture the messiness of disease. As a result, he’s making elusive genomic discoveries.[:]

[:eu]New math shows how, contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, conscious beings and other macroscopic entities might have greater influence over the future than does the sum of their microscopic components.[:]

[:eu]Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head. 10 [:]

[:eu]Researchers have looked further into the early universe than ever before. The new discoveries should make clear just how much black holes contributed to the reionization of the universe, even as they’ve opened up questions as to how such supermassive black holes were able to form so early in the universe’s history.[:]

[:eu]Time isn’t just another dimension, argues Tim Maudlin. To make his case, he’s had to reinvent geometry.[:]

[:eu]The new experiments suggest that simple models can explain the behavior of thousands of interacting organisms.[:]