The Quanta Podcast
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The Quanta Podcast
Exploring the distant universe, the insides of cells, the abstractions of math, the complexity of information itself, and much more, The Quanta Podcast is a tour of the frontier between the known and the unknown. In each episode, Quanta Magazine Editor-in-Chief Samir Patel speaks with the minds behi...
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Does Dad's Fitness Make Its Way Into Sperm?
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 sho...
The Shape That Can’t Pass Through Itself
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 is —...
Audio Edition: How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?
Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ.
T...
AI Filters Will Always Have Holes
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 try to...
ICYMI: Birds' Migratory Mitochondria
(This episode was first published in June 2025.)
Changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of f...
ICYMI: Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?
(This episode was first published in July 2025.)
Where does gravity come from? In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, this question...
Audio Edition: The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered
By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unified t...
Taking the Temperature of Quantum Entanglement
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 cold...
A Simple Way To Measure Knots Has Come Unraveled
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
When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement — and its inverse — have deep connections to many areas of math...
What Happens When Lakes Stop Mixing
Every summer since 1983, scientists at Crater Lake National Park have gathered data about the lake’s famous clarity. This past summer, Quanta contribu...
Game Theory, Algorithms and High Prices
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? TKTKTKTKT - audio coda
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
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 Samir...
Audio Edition: A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting
A powerful mathematical technique is used to model melting ice and other phenomena. But it has long been imperiled by certain “nightmare scenarios.” A...
The Mystery of Early Universe’s Little Red Dots
Recently, astrophysicists identified something peculiar: An enormous “naked” black hole with no galaxy in sight. On this week’s episode, host Samir Pa...
A Biography of Earth Across the Age of Animals
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 yea...
Audio Edition: ‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle
A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles — a new category of quantum particle — could be created in exotic materials.
The story ‘Parapar...
What We Learn From Running ‘Life’ in Reverse
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
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
It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it...
What Can a Cell Remember?
“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, bu...
Climate Modeling Is at a Crossroads
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
Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species.
The story A New, Chemical Vie...
AI's Dark Side Is Only a Nudge Away
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
For most of us, the word “climate” immediately generates thoughts of melting ice, rising seas, wildfires and gathering storms. However, in the course...
Audio Edition: ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture
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
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-yea...
Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface
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’
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 m...
A New Quantum Math of Cryptography
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 be...
How an Outsider Optimized Sphere-Packing
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
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
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
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
By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage prop...
When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field
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?
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
Britta Späth has dedicated her career to proving a single, central conjecture. She’s finally succeeded, alongside her partner, Marc Cabanes.
The...
When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color?
Colorful messages are constantly being exchanged across the natural world, to communicate everything from sexual attraction to self defense. But which...