'Ghostly' Galaxies and the Mystery of Dark Matter
In 2018, using the Keck Observatory in Hawaiʻi, astronomers discovered the first known dark matter-deficient galaxy, DF2. It’s about the sam...
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Quanta Science Podcast
In-depth news about mathematics, physics, biology and computer science.
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20 of 320 episodes
Sea Monkeys, Jupiter, and the Mystery of Turbulence
Turbulence is all around us: bumping our planes, roiling our rivers, swirling milk into our coffee. These systems quickly become extremely c...
'Jumping Genes' Are More Than Parasitic DNA
You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. But that’s not the entire story. Nearly half of your genome is a wild dra...
Are the Little Red Dots Actually Black Hole Suns?
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 Jame...
Four-Color Theorem Is Still a Math Favorite
In 1852, the mathematician Francis Guthrie was coloring in a map of English counties when he noticed that he needed only four colors. Was th...
Does Computer Science Need Computers?
In popular culture, computer science is practically synonymous with programming. There are obviously branches of computer science in which c...
How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World
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, i...
Picking Teams With the Math of Imbalance
Combinatorial discrepancy theory is a branch of mathematics concerned with balance. If you’re making two teams — sports, trivia, you name it...
What Makes a Fluid a Fluid?
The Navier-Stokes equations are enormously successful at predicting how fluids flow and swirl. But they fail to account for the microscopic...
Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons?
Reasoning comes in many technically defined forms, but the basic procedure is easily recognizable: arriving at a sound conclusion by linking...
Why Am I Left-Handed?
Why are only 10% of people left-handed? Geneticists, developmental biologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists have all sought...
Is Life Just Different?
There’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic material. Some scientists cite replication or met...
How Many Shuffles Do You Really Need to Randomize Your Deck?
In 1992, mathematicians Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis proved that seven riffle shuffles are enough to shuffle a deck of cards — but only if...
How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
How many pieces are there in the Standard Model of particle physics? 17, 30, 37, 61, 118? Or is the true answer much larger — and not even a...
The 'Truth Machine' That Is Changing Math
The groundbreaking proof assistant Lean acts as a sort of automatic quality control. It’s gaining ground in the math world — in part because...
Ecotypes Make the Idea of a Species Even Fuzzier
How do you define a species? The question has been controversial since the days of Darwin. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir...
What Actually Causes Lightning?
Thunderstorms have captivated humanity for millennia, and yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. On this episode of The Quanta P...
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
Most mathematicians take the notion of infinity for granted — it’s deeply rooted in math’s most fundamental assumptions. But a small group o...
Audio Edition: The Cells That Breathe Two Ways
In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at t...
Quantum Mechanics Might Be a Secret Key to Secure Communication
Together, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard figured out how to use the laws of quantum physics to keep secret messages safe from eavesdrop...