The Quanta Podcast

When all you can see is a speck, it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at. Astronomers first argued that little red dots spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2022 were distant galaxies on the cosmic horizon, mainly because of their brightness. Later, they concluded that little red dots look more like the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of most galaxies. But in the spring of 2025, two teams of astr...

In 1852, the mathematician Francis Guthrie was coloring in a map of English counties when he noticed that he needed only four colors. Was this always true, he wondered? The question captured the imagination of hobbyists and professionals alike — and in 1976, the mathematicians Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken proved it, rather controversially using computers. Recently, mathematicians have revisited the four-color theorem and ...

In popular culture, computer science is practically synonymous with programming. There are obviously branches of computer science in which computer hardware and software are essential, such as in the design of operating systems or the study of memory management. But in the theoretical side of the field, researchers need not ever touch a real, physical computer. Do computers play an essential conceptual role in that kind of theoreti...

If you are well rested and full, your brain tells you that a bruised overripe apple is a piece of subpar fruit to be passed over. However, if you are exhausted and hungry, an overripe apple is categorized as much-needed food. But how is the brain able to categorize that same apple in these situations? On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, co-host Hannah Waters speaks with contributing writer Conor Feehly about how the brain manage...

Combinatorial discrepancy theory is a branch of mathematics concerned with balance. If you’re making two teams — sports, trivia, you name it — how can you make sure that they’re perfectly balanced and fair, skill-wise? You start with vectors. 

On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with award-winning science journalist and regular contributor Max Levy on an “absurd,” &...

The Navier-Stokes equations are enormously successful at predicting how fluids flow and swirl. But they fail to account for the microscopic bits that make up matter. But now math based on symmetries offers a new conception of fluids and why they behave the way that they do.

On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with writer Charlie Wood on the longstanding effort to rebuild the theory of fluids from the botto...

Reasoning comes in many technically defined forms, but the basic procedure is easily recognizable: arriving at a sound conclusion by linking together intermediate steps that logically follow from each other. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, it appears AI can either solve famous mathematical research problems in one shot — or experience a “complete accuracy collapse” under the simplest conditions. So w...

Why are only 10% of people left-handed? Geneticists, developmental biologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists have all sought explanations, resulting in an astronomical amount of research into the mystery of handedness. No one has put all the pieces together yet, but over the last few years, some major new clues have emerged.

On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Hannah Waters speaks with writer Natalie Wolchover...

Generally, dark energy and dark matter are regarded as separate entities, but recent astronomical observations have spurred scientists to look further into a less widespread idea — that the two are in fact physically intertwined.

On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with Physics Editor Kathryn Jepsen about the theories surrounding dark energy’s ties to dark matter and the possibility of a shared...

There’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic material. Some scientists cite replication or metabolism. Others have another answer: Living organisms are different because they do stuff — for reasons. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with writer Philip Ball on the hotly contested idea of “biological agency” and what it means to be aliv...

In 1992, mathematicians Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis proved that seven riffle shuffles are enough to shuffle a deck of cards — but only if you can cut your deck with precision. Decades later, a new proof has finally extended the finding to less precise cuts. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with math editor Jordana Cepelewicz about how a mathematical cutoff phenomenon still exists for riffle shu...

Volcano forecasting can save countless lives. But most of the time warnings are more like educated guesses. How close are we to forecasting volcano behavior the way we forecast the weather? On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Hannah Waters speaks with writer and volcano expert Robin George Andrews about just how close we are to accurately forecasting volcanic eruptions. 

This topic was covered in a recent story for Quan...

In the 60s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist pureed a bunch of planarian worms and fed them to other ones. For years after, he claimed that the cannibal worms learned the ground-up worms’ memories. Could he have been… right? On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel and columnist Claire L. Evans discuss the weird history of memory transfer experiments, and their recent resurgence — and some them...