Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding within large language models (LLMs) — ...

More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ...

Using machine learning, string theorists are finally showing how microscopic configurations of extra dimensions translate ...

A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, ...

Freelance journalist Lesley Evans Ogden writes from Coast Salish territory in the verdant suburbs of Vancouver, Canada. A ...

Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space ...

For an important problem, it seemed as though laboriously trying every possibility was the best possible approach. Now ...

The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely how much pleasure and ...

Mathematicians think abstract tools from a field called symplectic geometry might help with planning missions to far-off ...

Founding editor-in-chief Thomas Lin looks back at a decade of Quanta journalism and forward to what’s next for the magazine.