The Quanta Podcast

“Memory” means many things to many people, and in many fields. We tend to understand memory to be a phenomenon that happens primarily in the brain, but in recent years, researchers have understood memory as a physical phenomenon that can occur in plenty of systems. On this episode, contributing writer Claire L. Evans tells host Samir Patel about how neuroscientists are probing the memory of individual cells.

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In order to trust machines with important jobs, we need a high level of confidence that they share our values and goals. Recent work shows that this “alignment” can be brittle, superficial, even unstable. In one study, a few training adjustments led a popular chatbot to recommend murder. On this episode, contributing writer Stephen Ornes tells host Samir Patel about what this research reveals.

Audio coda from The National A...

For most of us, the word “climate” immediately generates thoughts of melting ice, rising seas, wildfires and gathering storms. However, in the course of working to understand this pressing challenge, scientists have revealed so much more: A fundamental understanding of how Earth’s climate works. 

Quanta recently published a nine-story series that investigates this basic science. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, senior...

In the field of harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates.

Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student named Hannah Cairo solved a 40-year-old mystery about how some of these waves behave, surprising and exciting mathematicians. Cairo has not yet obtained a high school or undergraduate degree, but she recently began a doctoral program at the University of Ma...

In science textbooks, Earth looks like a round layer cake. There's a hard line between the liquid metal core and the putty-like rock mantle. But maybe that boundary is a little fuzzier than we previously thought. Strange, continent sized blobs rest on the dividing line. These blobs are leaching material from the Earth’s core, extending arms out into the mantle, and sending core material up and out through magmatic plumes. 

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We’re living in the golden age of cryptography. Since the 1970s, we've had more confidence in encryption than ever before. But there's a difference between confidence and absolute certainty. And computer scientists care a lot about that difference.

The search is always on for better, more secure secrets. But is it possible for digital security to be truly, provably unbreakable? Maybe, with a little help from math and physic...

How many oranges can you fit in a box? Mathematicians are obsessed with perfecting their answer to this question in not just our familiar three-dimensional world, but in higher and higher dimensions beyond it. For several decades, they've made only minimal progress toward finding an optimal solution. Then, this past April, an outsider to the field named Boaz Klartag posted a proof that bested these previous records by a si...

As far as we know, quantum mechanics is a universal theory that explains matter and light more or less perfectly. It shows us why atoms don't collapse and why electrons don't spiral into the nucleus of the atom. It explains why glass is clear, why grass is green, why the sky is blue. But no one fully understands how the math of quantum mechanics connects with the reality we live in. One could spend a lifetime getting into ...

When some people smell the molecule benzyl acetate, they identify a distinctly banana-y scent. But when others sniff the same compound, they get hints of nail polish remover. How can this be? Smell is a tricky sensory process to pin down. Our perception of scents is wide-ranging and often depends on lived experience. But researchers are building a deeper understanding of the processes underlying our noses’ elusive machiner...

The study of natural language processing, or NLP, dates back to the 1940s. It gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies another way to target us with ads. In less than five years, large language models broke NLP and made it anew.

In 2019, Quanta reported on a then-groundbreaking NLP system called BERT without once using the phrase “large language model.” A mere five and a half years later, LL...

As weird as it sounds, infinity comes in many shapes and sizes. And attempting to quantify it is sort of like a dog chasing its own tail. Or like infinities chasing infinities infinite numbers of times. But some mathematicians are obsessed with the quest.

In this episode, host Samir Patel and 𝘘𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢 math editor Jordana Cepelewicz probe the bizarre edges of the mathematical universe, a realm *almost* impossible...

Colorful messages are constantly being exchanged across the natural world, to communicate everything from sexual attraction to self defense. But which came first: these evocative signals or the sophisticated vision needed to see them? In this episode, host Samir Patel speaks with contributing writer Molly Herring about free diving, mantis shrimp, and the challenges of tracking coloration through evolutionary history. This ...