Quanta

Neural networks that borrow strategies from biology are making profound leaps in their abilities. Is ignoring a goal the best way to make truly intelligent machines?

A close look at fundamental symmetries has exposed hidden patterns in the universe. Physicists think that those same symmetries may also reveal time’s original secret.

Today Google announced that it achieved “quantum supremacy.” Its chief quantum computing rival, IBM, said it hasn’t. The disagreement hinges on what the term really means.

A major advance toward solving the 60-year-old sunflower conjecture is shedding light on how order begins to appear as random systems grow in size.

Studies suggest that epigenetics allows some learned adaptive responses to be passed down to new generations. The question is how.

Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior.

Two monumental works have led many mathematicians to avoid the equal sign. Their goal: Rebuild the foundations of the discipline upon the looser relationship of “equivalence.” The process has not […]

Only 170 million years ago, new plankton evolved. Their demand for carbon and calcium permanently transformed the seas as homes for life.

Cells in symbiotic partnership, nested one within the other and functioning like organelles, can borrow from their host’s genes to complete their own metabolic pathways.