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Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

New observations of microscopic vortices confirm the existence of a paradoxical phase of matter that may also arise inside ...

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

Yizhi “Patrick” Cai is coordinating a global effort to write a complete synthetic yeast genome. If he succeeds, the resulting cell will be the artificial life most closely related to humans to date.

The bunkbed conjecture says that the probability of finding the path on the bottom bunk is always greater than or equal to ...

A new experimental proposal suggests detecting a particle of gravity is far easier than anyone imagined. Now physicists are debating what it would really prove.

The idea of a species is fundamental to the way that many people understand the structure of life on Earth. But ask 10 specialists how they define the concept and you might get 10 answers. In this ...

All modern multicellular life — all life that any of us regularly see — is made of cells with a knack for ...