Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history, and its lessons are a massive human achievement. “How We Came To Know Earth,” our new series, is a guide to the modern understanding of fundamental climate science. www.quantamagazine.org/series/clima...

huh. along with abundant clean energy, fusion reactors might also be able to make *tons* of gold. arxiv.org/abs/2507.13461

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

This is absurd. The red supergiant Betelgeuse is the bright feature in this image. But that darker blue splotch is a *companion star* that's just been discovered—and it orbits so close to Betelgeuse that it's inside the larger star's outer atmosphere.

150 years ago you could get published in Nature by just describing how cute your pets are. www.nature.com/articles/012...

This year it is 10 years since the discovery of #GravitationalWaves in 2015! www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20... @ligo.org @egovirgo.bsky.social #GW150914 #GR24Amaldi16

"The Chipotle where Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense" encapsulates so much American history

Oh no

NSF budget would close down one of LIGO's sites. This would be, to put it lightly, a catastrophe for gravitational wave astronomy. "In FY 2026 NSF will operate only one of the two sites and will support a reduced level for technology development." bsky.app/profile/hast...

First sigma-eight. Now g-2. Anomalies are dropping like flies this year.

Absolutely delighted by this Andalite balloon animal—the work of Josh Steinhouse, The Geek Balloonist: thegeekballoonist.com/home He does a mean E.T., too. Thanks for the smile, Josh. ❤️ #Animorphs #BalloonArtist

Do singularities exist? I'd always thought they were purely mathematical artifacts, but recent work in mathematical physics work from @bousso.bsky.social and others hint otherwise (for sufficiently broad definitions of "singularities" and "exist"). www.quantamagazine.org/singularitie...

👀 On our radar: Beautiful physics of the ordinary 💬 “My deep and abiding feeling is that if you look at anything closely enough, there will be new riches to be found” —Sidney Nagel ✍️ Charlie Wood, @quantamagazine.bsky.social 🔗 www.quantamagazine.org/finding-beau...

It is that one glorious week of the year where New York feels like The Room in Community youtu.be/VxxYqE4Gil8?...

Love it when my worlds collide

Why do drops leave ring-shaped stains? Why do splashes splash? Had great fun chatting with Sid Nagel about beautiful, unappreciated physics right under our noses. www.quantamagazine.org/finding-beau...

What a day to have studied Latin in Chicago.

For #BlackHoleWeek, why not go explore spacetime around a black hole? Oh... because it'd be incredibly dangerous? Good point. Well, how about you use this (nearly*) perfectly safe simulation. testtubegames.com/blackhole.html *There is always a small risk of collapsing into a simgularity.

I tore through all 60ish Animorphs books a few years ago and was shocked at how good they were. Can confirm they're a great read and long overdue for their prestige HBO show.

#GravitationalWaves provide a unique way to study black holes This Orrery (by Zoheyr Doctor) illustrates the diverse black hole binaries and neutron star black–hole binaries from our O3b run. More massive binaries are shown as orbiting more slowly #BlackHoleWeek 🔭

Just incredible that Trump is turning Onion headlines into real headlines in less than a month theonion.com/trump-calmly... www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/u...

how many wikipedia editors does it take to change a light bulb? so far 3439 different people have contributed to the "incandescent light bulb" article but it's not done being changed yet so who knows

Pocket guide to materials discovery calculation methods (repost from the other place)

Everyone go check out Quanta's new special feature about AI. It was a huge undertaking by the team and we hope you enjoy it. www.quantamagazine.org/series/scien...

I wrote about the new color gift link: www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Light signatures can help astronomers deduce the atmospheric gases of planets circling stars many light years away. Determining the nature of these alien skies is one of the goals of the James Webb Space Telescope. 🧵1/5

dios mio

I wrote about the science (and media roll out) behind that “possible sign of life on a distant planet” gift link: www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

#todayilearned that any sequence of numbers categorized in the On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences can be exported as a MIDI file. Here's the audio for part of the Fibonacci sequence played on a grand piano. It's... not as nice as you would hope for it to be.

New rule of thumb: No matter how fast you think solar is growing, it's growing faster than you think (even if you already know this)

Last time we all lost our minds over K2-18b 🔭 , I wrote this blog post. The summary is... don't.

Does that mean the walls are CFTs??

A year and a half ago I told @mmoyer.bsky.social I wanted to do a deep dive into whether spacetime was real. After he said yes, the result became a good chunk of this package, with a ton of work from the whole Quanta team and beyond. So thrilled we got to do this, and that it has won this award

Remember when we "de-extincted" dinosaurs back in 2011? Me either www.ted.com/talks/jack_h...

Took 1.5 years at Quanta to assign my first bird story 😇 @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social's beautiful writing + excellent reporting about the evolution of intelligence — evidence that birds evolved complex brain circuits independently of our mammal intelligence www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence...

Today is International Beaver Day! The internet tells me it is a great time to lead a hike to a beaver pond. It's also a great time to supplement your doomscrolling with a deep dive into my favorite theoretical computer science breakthrough from last year.

Calling someone bird-brained is, in fact, a way of calling someone highly intelligent. @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence...

Say hello to a new subway map! 🗺️ Today, the MTA unveiled a new subway diagram that provides riders with essential travel information in an easily readable, bright, and orderly manner.

Severance fans.... hear me out. 🧵

Enjoy a dizzying flight through the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument’s new map of millions of galaxies. www.quantamagazine.org/is-dark-ener...

Chaos, with its fluttering butterflies 🦋 and drifting ducks 🦆, finds a graceful voice in this Quanta Fundamentals piece by @walkingthedot.bsky.social . A captivating dive into unpredictability—highly recommended! ✨📚 www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-ch...

would play this remake in a heartbeat

The only actual general intelligence we know doesn’t need to be trained on the entire corpus of written text and only needs about 100 W power.

RIP Gaia 🫡, you taught us so much about our galactic home

Stiller must have vetoed calling the Severance pod, The You You Are Talkin' to the Me I Am?

Who knew the darkest timeline could also be the funniest timeline

This is part of DESI's recently released map of our universe. Each snowflake in this blizzard is a galaxy. Not sure if it's terrifying or comforting, but it's definitely jawdropping! More videos at noirlab.edu/public/video... 🌌⚛️ 🧪

It’s important to map out our universe! But dynamical dark energy remains wildly implausible. It’s a fanciful notion, requires fine tuning worse than a pencil on its tip, and yet more tuning for the sole purpose of hiding itself from observers for so long. I call it a unicorn in a duck suit here:

Had a blast covering one of the biggest physics stories of the year: hints that dark energy may be weakening continue to pile up. It's a finding that confounds many theorists, but it will take a lot more work to sort out what's actually going on. www.quantamagazine.org/is-dark-ener...