Stories by Quanta Magazine

A new technique for finding and characterizing microbes has boosted the number of known bacteria by almost 50 percent, revealing a hidden world all around us.

The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks

Researchers have begun to catalogue how soil microbes are changing the world

Modern birds appeared to emerge in a snap of evolutionary time. But new research illuminates the long series of evolutionary changes that made the transformation possible

Animals raised under the same conditions are creating a biological map of what makes individuals unique

Researchers are resurrecting ancient proteins to illuminate Earth’s biological dark ages

In his latest book Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg explores how science made the modern world, and where it might take us from here

Is dark energy a cosmic chameleon that can fade into its surroundings? A recent test brings the mysterious antigravitational force down-to-earth

Quantum computing pioneer Ivan H. Deutsch explains why analog quantum simulators may beat out general-purpose digital quantum machines for now

Researchers are on the trail of a mysterious connection between number theory, algebra and string theory

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which operates at a lower energy than the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, recently fired up for its 15th run to look at quarks and gluons

A quest to unravel the architecture of the double helix is revealing the subtle genetic orchestration of life

A recent solution to the "prisoner's dilemma," a classic game theory scenario, has created new puzzles in evolutionary biology

Enormous databases of medical records have begun to reveal connections among diseases that could provide insights into the biological missteps that make us sick

All life on Earth is made of molecules that twist in the same direction. New research reveals that this may not always have been so

The same mental processes that organize memories may also coordinate how we make decisions

The movement of lizards around the Caribbean is forcing an accounting for human activity in even the most basic ecological models

Our bodies are a genetic patchwork, possessing variation from cell to cell. Is that a good thing?

A short stretch of DNA challenges what it means to be a species

David Spergel explains why a widely publicized gravitational-wave discovery could be wrong, and how it could affect the public’s perception of science

A co-designer of an experiment that might have confirmed gravitational waves isn't bothered by criticism that cosmic dust may account for his results

When scientists traced a museum rock back to its origins, they uncovered mysteries about the early solar system

Cells have evolved ways to put random variability in he outside environment to work

By comparing the genomes of social and solitary bees, scientists hope to uncover the basis for communal behavior