The Quanta Podcast
Episodes
Ice Is Way More Complex Than It Seems
19 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past decade, computer simulations have predicted tens of thousands of possible forms of ice. Though uncommon on our planet, exotic ice may ex...
Audio Edition: How Distillation Makes AI Models Smaller and Cheaper
14 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Fundamental technique lets researchers use a big, expensive “teacher” model to train a “student” model for less.The story How Distillation Mak...
Our Immune Systems Are Full of Ancient Weapons
12 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Billions of years ago, battles between bacteria and viruses wrote the rulebook for how hosts and pathogens behave. Today, our immune system follows su...
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
05 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Most mathematicians take the notion of infinity for granted — it’s deeply rooted in math’s most fundamental assumptions. But a small group of re...
Audio Edition: The Cells That Breathe Two Ways
30 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 the same ...
Quantum Mechanics Might Be a Secret Key to Secure Communication
28 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Together, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard figured out how to use the laws of quantum physics to keep secret messages safe from eavesdroppers. Thei...
Is String Theory Still Our Best Hope?
21 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Is string theory the one true “theory of everything?” Some physicists swear it’s a fundamental ingredient of nature. Others wish it would just g...
Audio Edition: New Physics-Inspired Proof Probes the Borders of Disorder
16 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, mathematicians have struggled to understand matrices that reflect both order and randomness, like those that model semiconductors. A new ...
One of Nature’s Most Complex Molecular Machines
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
At the center of little holes in cell nuclei is a mystery. Here, clumps of proteins wiggle disordered tails around like seaweed. They drive a molecula...
The Fundamental Tension at the Heart of Math
07 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to think of math as all about logic and rigor. But what “rigor” actually means has been shaken up quite a few times over the past few cent...
Audio Edition: AI Comes Up With Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work.
02 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence software is designing novel experimental protocols that improve upon the work of human physicists, although the humans are sti...
Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff?
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Humanoid robots can run, crawl, and sort objects in flashy demos. So why can’t they reliably climb stairs or open doors? On this episode of The Quan...
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...