Quanta Magazine

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of cryptography. Several years ago, researchers found a radically new approach to encryption that lacks this potential weak spot. The approach exploits the peculiar features of…

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Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final years, Stephen Hawking working with Thomas Hertog proposed a striking idea: The laws of physics were not precisely determined before the Big Bang; they evolved as the universe evolved.

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Take a deep breath. A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires in cells throughout your body. You, being an aerobic organism, use oxygen as the cellular spark that frees molecular energy from the food you eat. But not all organisms on the planet live or breathe this way. Instead of using oxygen to harvest energy…

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There are precision measurements, and then there’s the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. In each of LIGO’s twin gravitational wave detectors (one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana), laser beams bounce back and forth down the four-kilometer arms of a giant L. When a gravitational wave passes through, the length of one arm changes relative to the other…

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The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount of attention. Most of it focused on the fact that a relatively small and unknown company said it had built a chatbot that rivaled the performance of those from the world’s most famous AI companies, but using a fraction of the computer power and cost. As a result, the stocks of many Western tech…

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In October 2015, a young mathematician named Clemens Sämann was flying home to Austria from a conference in Turin, Italy, when he had a chance encounter. He found himself seated beside Michael Kunzinger, another conference attendee. Kunzinger was a math professor at the University of Vienna, where Sämann had just started his postdoctoral research. They soon got to talking, landing on a subject…

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When the sun shines on your skin, what does it hit? When it causes a burn, what went wrong? Underneath that pain is your cells’ emergency response to DNA damage. When a hazard, such as ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation or certain chemicals, damages DNA, the cell needs to respond at breakneck speed. Ideally it either repairs the damage to its genomic information repository…

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