Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Mathematicians have studied knots for centuries, but a new material is showing why some knots are better than others.Image…

Claudius Ptolemy’s monumental astronomy book, the Almagest, established a unified mathematical framework for computing the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets at any time…

If you ask Siri to show you the weirdest people in the world, what images might you see? In fact, none. Siri showed me different links to the same scientific paper, published a decade…

The only intelligent life forms we know of reside here on Earth. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying to answer the question: “Are we alone?” The search for extraterrestrial…

Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech writer for President Obama, writing presidential…

On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my computer to write music on its own. I wanted to…

Water rushes into Venice’s city council chamber just minutes after the local government rejects measures to combat climate change. Wildfires consume eastern Australia as fire danger…

Can AI teach itself the laws of physics? Will classical computers soon be replaced by deep neural networks? Sure looks like it, if you’ve been following the news, which lately has…

Google and company claim that their quantum computer can do in 200 seconds what it would take a supercomputer 10,000 years to do.Illustration by plotplot / ShutterstockNews on the…

Artificial Intelligence, it seems, is now everywhere. Text translation, speech recognition, book recommendations, even your spam filter is now “artificially intelligent.” But just…