The buckminsterfullerene revolution never came, but some researchers are eagerly exploring the properties of newfound carbon crystals known as fullertubes.

Momentum for new ideas in Alzheimer’s research joined advances in neuroscience, developmental biology and origin-of-life studies to make 2022 a memorable year of biological insights.

Computer scientists this year learned how to transmit perfect secrets, why transformers seem so good at everything, and how to improve on decades-old algorithms (with a little help from AI).

In a year filled with sweet new observations in astronomy and tantalizing breakthroughs in condensed matter physics, the brand-new space telescope takes the cake.

Four Fields Medals were awarded for major breakthroughs in geometry, combinatorics, statistical physics and number theory, even as mathematicians continued to wrestle with how computers are changing the discipline.

While the internet is awash in the noise of unmoderated comments, Quanta has attempted to provide a quiet, information-rich spot where readers, listeners and viewers can contemplate the complexity of nature.

On nights and weekends, Justin Gilmer attacked an old question in pure math using the tools of information theory.

A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth.

Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes ink to spread through water.

Random circuit sampling, a popular technique for showing the power of quantum computers, doesn’t scale up if errors go unchecked.

Queen ants live far longer than genetically identical workers. Researchers are learning what their longevity secrets could mean for aging in other species.

Nikta Fakhri is adapting and extending concepts from physics to describe how tiny biological components give rise to living organisms.

Mathematicians are taking ideas developed to study random numbers and applying them to a broad range of categories.

Tiny genetic sequences in a mother’s bacteria seem to hop into the infant’s bacteria, perhaps ensuring a healthy microbiome later in life.

Researchers can now find the shortest route through a network nearly as fast as theoretically possible, even when some steps can cancel out others.

Mathematicians have uncovered a surprising wealth of rock-paper-scissors-like patterns in randomly chosen dice.

Reports that the James Webb Space Telescope killed the reigning cosmological model turn out to have been exaggerated. But astronomers still have much to learn from distant galaxies glimpsed by Webb.

Whether you’re passing secret notes in class or downloading images from a space probe, Reed-Solomon codes offer an ingenious way to embed information and correct for errors.

In three-dimensional space, the surface of a black hole must be a sphere. But a new result shows that in higher dimensions, an infinite number of configurations are possible.

In Shang-Hua Teng’s work, theoretical and practical questions have long been intertwined. Now he’s turning his focus to the impractical.

Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease.