The Quanta Podcast

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, if you are exhausted and hungry

Audio Edition: A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life

The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing. The article A Cell So Minimal

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 — how can you make sure that

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 bits that make up matter. But

Audio Edition: New Proofs Probe Soap-Film Singularities

Mathematicians have broken through a long-standing barrier in the study of “minimizing surfaces,” which play an important role in both math and physics. The article New

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 together intermediate steps t

Why Am I Left-Handed?

Why are only 10% of people left-handed? Geneticists, developmental biologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists have all sought explanations, resulting in an

Audio Edition: Old ‘Ghost’ Theory of Quantum Gravity Makes a Comeback

Has the secret to understanding gravity been hiding in plain sight for nearly 50 years? The article Old ‘Ghost’ Theory of Quantum Gravity Makes a Comeback first appeared

A Dark Dimension Could Link Two of the Universe’s Great Unknowns

Generally, dark energy and dark matter are regarded as separate entities, but recent astronomical observations have spurred scientists to look further into a less widespr

Is Life Just Different?

There’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic material. Some scientists cite replication or metabolism. Others have another a

Audio Edition: ‘World Models,’ an Old Idea in AI, Mount a Comeback

You’re carrying around in your head a model of how the world works. Will AI systems need to do the same? The article ‘World Models,’ an Old Idea in AI, Mount a Comeback

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 you can cut your deck with pre

Will We Ever Be Able To Forecast Volcanic Eruptions Like Weather?

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 fo

Audio Edition: Tiny Tubes Reveal Clues to the Evolution of Complex Life

Scientists have identified tubulin structures in primitive Asgard archea that may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons. The article Tiny Tubes Reveal Cl

Are Memories Transferable — or Edible?

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

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 an integer? It depends on your

Audio Edition: What Is the Fourier Transform?

Amid the chaos of revolutionary France, one man’s mathematical obsession gave way to a calculation that now underpins much of mathematics and physics. The calculation, ca

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 it can interact with AI to op

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 Patel speaks with writer Marl

What Actually Causes Lightning?

Thunderstorms have captivated humanity for millennia, and yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, guest host and Quanta