Quanta Science Podcast
1) The Shape That Can’t Pass Through Itself
Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s big enough for the other to slide through? It is — but what about other shapes? In a paper posted onl...Show More
2) Audio Edition: How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?
Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ. The story How Much Energy Does It Take To Think? first a...Show More
3) AI Filters Will Always Have Holes
Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help with that.” But users have long played a cat-and-mouse game to try to trick language models into providing forbidden inf...Show More
4) ICYMI: Birds' Migratory Mitochondria
(This episode was first published in June 2025.) Changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of flight muscles provide extra energy for birds’ continent...Show More
5) ICYMI: Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?
(This episode first aired in July, 2025.) Where does gravity come from? In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, this question is a big problem. One controversial theory proposes that the f...Show More
6) Audio Edition: The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered
By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unified theory” of math. The story The Core of Fermat’s La...Show More
7) Taking the Temperature of Quantum Entanglement
We all know that hot coffee cools down. But quantum mechanics can enable heat to flow the “wrong” way, making hot objects hotter and cold objects colder. Now physicists think this might have an ingeni...Show More
8) A Simple Way To Measure Knots Has Come Unraveled
In math and science, knots do far more than keep shoes on feet. For more than a century, mathematicians have studied the properties of different knots and been rewarded by a wide range of useful appli...Show More
9) Audio Edition: How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory
When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement — and its inverse — have deep connections to many areas of math and computer science. The story How a Problem Abo...Show More
10) What Happens When Lakes Stop Mixing
Every summer since 1983, scientists at Crater Lake National Park have gathered data about the lake’s famous clarity. This past summer, Quanta contributing writer Rachel Nuwer journeyed with them as th...Show More