Quanta
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How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities
Richard Feynman’s path integral is both a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy about how the world is. But physicists are still struggling to figure out how to use it, […]
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Mathematicians Eliminate Long-Standing Threat to Knot Conjecture
A new proof shows that a knot some thought would contradict the famed slice-ribbon conjecture doesn’t.
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Astronomers Say They Have Spotted the Universe’s First Stars
Theory has it that “Population III” stars brought light to the cosmos. The James Webb Space Telescope may have just glimpsed them.
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Mathematicians Find an Infinity of Possible Black Hole Shapes
In three-dimensional space, the surface of a black hole must be a sphere. But a new result shows that in higher dimensions, an infinite number of configurations are possible.
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Standard Model of Cosmology Survives a Telescope’s Surprising Finds
Reports that the James Webb Space Telescope killed the reigning cosmological model turn out to have been exaggerated. But astronomers still have much to learn from distant galaxies glimpsed by […]
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Mobile Genes From the Mother Shape the Baby’s Microbiome
Tiny genetic sequences in a mother’s bacteria seem to hop into the infant’s bacteria, perhaps ensuring a healthy microbiome later in life.
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Ants Live 10 Times Longer by Altering Their Insulin Responses
Queen ants live far longer than genetically identical workers. Researchers are learning what their longevity secrets could mean for aging in other species.
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Google Researcher, Long Out of Math, Cracks Devilish Problem About Sets
On nights and weekends, Justin Gilmer attacked an old question in pure math using the tools of information theory.
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The Year in Math
Four Fields Medals were awarded for major breakthroughs in geometry, combinatorics, statistical physics and number theory, even as mathematicians continued to wrestle with how computers are changing the discipline.