The Quanta Podcast

Uniting a Century of Digital and Analog Astronomy

24 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

To better understand our cosmos, some astronomers and astrophysicists go old school. Preserved beautifully on a hundred years of glass plate photograp...

Audio Edition: Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity

19 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an ...

Astrocytes Might Be in Charge of the Brain

17 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We tend to think of neurons as the sole engine of our thoughts, emotions, and everything in between.  For decades, a group of large brain cells calle...

The Infinite Heist - Part 2

10 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In 1874, Georg Cantor published one of the most important papers in math’s 4,000-year history. Some ideas in it were stolen. On this episode of The ...

Audio Edition: The Ecosystem Dynamics That Can Make or Break an Invasion

05 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

By simulating ecological networks with microbes, researchers revealed properties that may make natural communities susceptible to invasion.The story T...

The Infinite Heist - Part 1

03 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In 1874, Georg Cantor published one of the most important papers in math’s 4,000-year history. Some ideas in it were stolen. On this episode of The ...

Decoding the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics

24 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Parallel universes, mysterious collapses, divided worlds. These are among the interpretations of quantum theory’s relationship with reality. It’s ...

Audio Edition: Epic Effort to Ground Physics in Math Opens Up the Secrets of Time

19 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

By mathematically proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in...

How Animals Build a Sense of Direction

17 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

What guides a bat’s internal compass? It’s not the stars in the sky, or the Earth’s magnetic field. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host ...

Mathematicians Want To Make Fluid Equations Glitch Out

10 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In reality, water doesn’t glitch out. It can’t instantly change direction or spurt randomly into the sky. But on a purely mathematical level, such...

Audio Edition: Matter vs. Force: Why There Are Exactly Two Types of Particles

05 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories. Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep ...

Do AI Models Agree On How They Encode Reality?

03 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the allegory of Plato’s cave, prisoners see the world only through shadows. Extending this metaphor to AI, AI models are the prisoners and the sh...

Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?

27 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Particle physics hasn't yet found the new physics needed to resolve its deepest mysteries. It’s hard to know what to think about or look for. But th...

Audio Edition: How Can AI Researchers Save Energy? By Going Backward.

22 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Reversible programs run backward as easily as they run forward, saving energy in theory. After decades of research, they may soon power AI.The story H...

Does Dad's Fitness Make Its Way Into Sperm?

20 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We already know that what we eat, drink, and inhale can affect which parts of our DNA are expressed, and which aren’t. But recent research poses a s...

The Shape That Can’t Pass Through Itself

13 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s big enough for the other to slide through? It i...

Audio Edition: How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?

08 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ.The st...

AI Filters Will Always Have Holes

06 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help with that.” But users have long played a cat-and-mouse game to t...

ICYMI: Birds' Migratory Mitochondria

30 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

(This episode was first published in June 2025.)Changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of flight m...

ICYMI: Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?

23 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

(This episode first aired in July, 2025.) Where does gravity come from? In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, this question is a big prob...

Audio Edition: The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered

18 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unifi...

Taking the Temperature of Quantum Entanglement

16 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We all know that hot coffee cools down. But quantum mechanics can enable heat to flow the “wrong” way, making hot objects hotter and cold objects ...

A Simple Way To Measure Knots Has Come Unraveled

09 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In math and science, knots do far more than keep shoes on feet. For more than a century, mathematicians have studied the properties of different knots...

Audio Edition: How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement — and its inverse — have deep connections to many areas of m...

What Happens When Lakes Stop Mixing

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every summer since 1983, scientists at Crater Lake National Park have gathered data about the lake’s famous clarity. This past summer, Quanta contri...

Game Theory, Algorithms and High Prices

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do sellers decide how to price their goods? Competition should keep prices down, while collusion can rig higher prices (and break the law). On thi...

Why Are Waves So Hard to Grasp?

18 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At first glance, studying the math of waves seems like it should be smooth sailing. But the equations that describe even the gentlest rolling waves ar...

Sleep Is Not All or Nothing

11 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Salvador Dalí, Thomas Edison and Edgar Allan Poe all took inspiration from the state between sleep and waking life. On this week’s episode, host Sa...

Audio Edition: A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting

06 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A powerful mathematical technique is used to model melting ice and other phenomena. But it has long been imperiled by certain “nightmare scenarios.”...

The Mystery of Early Universe’s Little Red Dots

04 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Recently, astrophysicists identified something peculiar: An enormous “naked” black hole with no galaxy in sight. On this week’s episode, host Sa...

A Biography of Earth Across the Age of Animals

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Thanks to a delicate interplay between plate tectonics and life, Earth’s thermostat has kept animal life thriving on our planet for half a billion y...

Audio Edition: ‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle

23 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles — a new category of quantum particle — could be created in exotic materials.The story ‘Parapart...

What We Learn From Running ‘Life’ in Reverse

21 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine a set of simple building blocks that can self-assemble into any shape you want. The possibilities for such a technology could be boundless. In...

The Math of Catastrophe

14 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Around 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was a lush grassland. Then, as if a switch flipped, it began to dry out, becoming the desert that we know today. Ti...

Audio Edition: Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do ...

What Can a Cell Remember?

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“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...

Climate Modeling Is at a Crossroads

30 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The climate is changing. So is the way we understand the climate. On this week's episode, contributing writer Zack Savitsky joins host Samir Patel to ...

Audio Edition: A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species.The story A New, Chemical View of Ec...

AI's Dark Side Is Only a Nudge Away

23 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 “...

How We Came To Know Earth

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For most of us, the word “climate” immediately generates thoughts of melting ice, rising seas, wildfires and gathering storms. However, in the cou...

Audio Edition: ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture

11 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a wh...

How a 17-Year-Old Solved a Major Math Mystery

09 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface

02 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Audio Edition: The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’

28 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that...

A New Quantum Math of Cryptography

26 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

How an Outsider Optimized Sphere-Packing

19 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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-dimens...

Audio Edition: Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

14 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed p...

‘It’s a Mess’: A Brain-Bending Trip to Quantum Theory’s 100th Birthday Party

12 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

How Smell Guides Our Inner World

05 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Audio Edition: How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories

31 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage pr...

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 an...

Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?

22 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 infi...

Audio Edition: After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem

17 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Britta Späth has dedicated her career to proving a single, central conjecture. She’s finally succeeded, alongside her partner, Marc Cabanes.The sto...

When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color?

15 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Colorful messages are constantly being exchanged across the natural world, to communicate everything from sexual attraction to self defense. But which...

Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?

08 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Where does gravity come from? In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, this question is a big problem. One controversial theory proposes that...

Audio Edition: How Noether’s Theorem Revolutionized Physics

03 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights continue to shape physic...

How Amateurs Solved a Major Computer Science Puzzle

01 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Busy Beaver Challenge, an open online collaboration, started in 2022 to finally solve a major problem in theoretical computer science. Over time, ...

The Mysterious Math of Turbulence

24 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Turbulence is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to study. Mathematicians are now starting to untangle it at its smallest scales.This is the sixth epi...

Audio Edition: Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build Memories

19 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Individual cells in the brain light up for specific ideas. These concept neurons, once known as “Jennifer Aniston cells,” help us think, imagine a...

Birds' Migratory Mitochondria

17 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of flight muscles provide extra energy for birds’ contine...

Singularities Are Hard to Kill

10 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists must go to the ends of space and t...

Audio Edition: Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case.

05 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof.The story Heat Destroys All O...

In Computers, Memory Is More Useful Than Time

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science.This is the ...

Math and Beauty in the Age of AI

27 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mathematicians have started to prepare for a profound shift in what it means to do math.This is the second episode of our new weekly series The Quanta...

Audio Edition: Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way.

22 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language. By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, linguists can use neural net...

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK

20 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.This is the first episode of our new weekly seri...

Introducing The Quanta Podcast

13 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Quanta Podcast is your weekly dispatch from the frontiers of science and mathematics. In each episode, editor in chief Samir Patel will talk to th...

Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold

08 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a first, researchers have shown that adding more “qubits” to a quantum computer can make it more resilient. It’s an essential step on the lon...

Fish Have a Brain Microbiome. Could Humans Have One Too?

24 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The discovery that other vertebrates have healthy, microbial brains is fueling the still controversial possibility that we might have them as well. Th...

Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound

10 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Three new species of superconductivity were spotted this year, illustrating the myriad ways electrons can join together to form a frictionless quantum...

It Might Be Possible to Detect Gravitons After All

27 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A new experimental proposal suggests detecting a particle of gravity is far easier than anyone imagined. Now physicists are debating what it would rea...

How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates something out of nothing. The pos...

The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore ...

The Cellular Secret to Resisting the Pressure of the Deep Sea

05 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Cell membranes from comb jellies reveal a new kind of adaptation to the deep sea: curvy lipids that conform to an ideal shape under pressure. The post...

Computer Scientists Prove That Heat Destroys Quantum Entanglement

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

While devising a new quantum algorithm, four researchers accidentally established a hard limit on entanglement. The post Computer Scientists Prove Tha...

Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect

15 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Carbon dioxide’s powerful heat-trapping effect has been traced to a quirk of its quantum structure. The finding may explain climate change better th...

What Happens in a Mind That Can't 'See' Mental Images

11 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the swe...

What Could Explain the Gallium Anomaly?

26 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results po...

Cryptographers Discover a New Foundation for Quantum Secrecy

13 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Researchers have proved that secure quantum encryption is possible in a world without hard problems. The post Cryptographers Discover a New Foundation...

Electric 'Ripples' in the Resting Brain Tag Memories for Storage

30 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

New experiments reveal how the brain chooses which memories to save and add credence to advice about the importance of rest.

AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory's Near-Endless Possibilities

16 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Using machine learning, string theorists are finally showing how microscopic configurations of extra dimensions translate into sets of elementary part...

Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare

02 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustacea...

Dark Energy May Be Weakening, Major Astrophysics Study Finds

18 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A generation of physicists has referred to the dark energy that permeates the universe as “the cosmological constant.” Now the largest map of the ...

Brain's 'Background Noise' May Explain Value of Shock Therapy

04 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Electroconvulsive therapy is highly effective in treating major depressive disorder, but no one knows why it works. New research suggests it may resto...

Swirling Forces, Crushing Pressures Measured in the Proton

21 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces and pressures inside a subatomic parti...

Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Two researchers have proved that Penrose tilings, famous patterns that never repeat, are mathematically equivalent to a kind of quantum error correcti...

Radio Maps May Reveal the Universe's Biggest Magnetic Fields

25 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A controversial technique has produced detailed maps of the magnetic fields in colossal galaxy clusters. If confirmed, the approach could be used to r...

New Clues for What Will Happen When the Sun Eats the Earth

10 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Recent observations of an aging, alien planetary system are helping to answer the question: What will happen to our planet when the sun dies? Read mor...

New Cell Atlases Reveal Untold Variety in the Brain and Beyond

26 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Recent efforts to map every cell in the human body have researchers floored by unfathomable diversity, with many thousands of subtly different types o...

Extra-Long Blasts Challenge Our Theories of Cosmic Cataclysms

11 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Astronomers thought they had solved the mystery of gamma-ray bursts. A few recent events suggest otherwise. Read more at QuantaMagazine.org. Music is ...

Meet Strange Metals: Where Electricity May Flow Without Electrons

29 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For 50 years, physicists have understood current as a flow of charged particles. But a new experiment has found that in at least one strange material,...

In the Gut's 'Second Brain,' Key Agents of Health Emerge

15 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scie...

During Pregnancy, a Fake 'Infection' Protects the Fetus

01 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Cells in the placenta have an unusual trick for activating gentle immune defenses and keeping them turned on when no infection is present. It involves...

Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better

17 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new questions about memory, attention and mathema...

Inside Scientists' Life-Saving Prediction of the Iceland Eruption

03 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Reykjanes Peninsula has entered a new volcanic era. Innovative efforts to map and monitor the subterranean magma are saving lives. Read more at Qu...

Echoes of Electromagnetism Found in Number Theory

20 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A new magnum opus posits the existence of a hidden mathematical link akin to the connection between electricity and magnetism. Read more at QuantaMaga...

Tiny Language Models Come of Age

06 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic children’s stories. Read more ...

Rogue Worlds Throw Planetary Ideas Out of Orbit

21 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Scientists have recently discovered scores of free-floating worlds that defy classification. The new observations have forced them to rethink their th...

What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells

07 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Every species develops at its own unique tempo, leaving scientists to wonder what governs their timing. A suite of new findings suggests that cells us...

An Old Conjecture Falls, Making Spheres a Lot More Complicated

24 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The telescope conjecture gave mathematicians a handle on ways to map one sphere to another. Now that it has been disproved, the universe of shapes has...