Quanta Science Podcast
1) Audio Edition: A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems
Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species. The story A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems first appeared on Quanta Magazine.
2) AI's Dark Side Is Only a Nudge Away
In order to trust machines with important jobs, we need a high level of confidence that they share our values and goals. Recent work shows that this “alignment” can be brittle, superficial, even unsta...Show More
3) How We Came To Know Earth
For most of us, the word “climate” immediately generates thoughts of melting ice, rising seas, wildfires and gathering storms. However, in the course of working to understand this pressing challenge, ...Show More
4) Audio Edition: ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture
The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a whole crop of related problems. The story ‘Once in...Show More
5) How a 17-Year-Old Solved a Major Math Mystery
In the field of harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates. Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student named Hannah Cairo solved a 4...Show More
6) Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface
In science textbooks, Earth looks like a round layer cake. There's a hard line between the liquid metal core and the putty-like rock mantle. But maybe that boundary is a little fuzzier than we previou...Show More
7) Audio Edition: The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’
Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have...Show More
8) A New Quantum Math of Cryptography
We’re living in the golden age of cryptography. Since the 1970s, we've had more confidence in encryption than ever before. But there's a difference between confidence and absolute certainty. And compu...Show More
9) How an Outsider Optimized Sphere-Packing
How many oranges can you fit in a box? Mathematicians are obsessed with perfecting their answer to this question in not just our familiar three-dimensional world, but in higher and higher dimensions b...Show More
10) Audio Edition: Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture
A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible. The story How Undergraduate Upends a 40-...Show More