For all their triumphs, AI systems can’t seem to generalize the concepts of “same” and “different.” Without that, researchers worry, the quest to create truly intelligent machines may be hopeless.

Even in an incomplete state, quantum field theory is the most successful physical theory ever discovered. Nathan Seiberg, one of its leading architects, talks about the gaps in QFT and how…

Genomic surveillance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus can help control the current pandemic and prevent future ones. But the process is marred by insufficient data and geographic inequities.

In this month’s puzzle, math is a question of life or death.

These ultrabright flashes have recently been tracked for days, upending ideas about the cataclysms that create them.

Other diseases with long-term symptoms can help us understand how COVID can affect us long after the virus itself is gone.

Mitochondria appear to communicate and cooperate with one another, both within and between cells. Biologists are only just beginning to understand how and why.

A temporal pattern of activity observed in human brains for the first time may explain how we can learn so quickly.

A group of mathematicians has shown that at critical moments, a symmetry called rotational invariance is a universal property across many physical systems.

The DNA of some viruses doesn’t use the same four nucleotide bases found in all other life. New work shows how this exception is possible and hints that it could be more common than we think.

Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies.

For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise.

The Standard Model is a sweeping equation that has correctly predicted the results of virtually every experiment ever conducted, as Quanta explores in a new video.

Laurent Fargues and Peter Scholze have found a new, more powerful way of connecting number theory and geometry as part of the sweeping Langlands program.

The root of today’s quantum revolution was John Stewart Bell’s 1964 theorem showing that quantum mechanics really permits instantaneous connections between far-apart locations.

Scientists have reported large DNA structures in some archaea that defy easy categorization.

Using high school algebra and geometry, and knowing just one rational point on a circle or elliptic curve, we can locate infinitely many others.

Theorists are in a frenzy over “fractons,” bizarre, but potentially useful, hypothetical particles that can only move in combination with one another.

A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects.

Mathematicians using the computer program Lean have verified the accuracy of a difficult theorem at the cutting edge of research mathematics.

Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.