The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even ...

The effects of insufficient water are felt by every cell in the body, but it’s the brain that manifests our experience of ...

Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size ...

Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

Explore Quanta’s artificial intelligence coverage.AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can ...

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the ...

After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ...

A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is ...

Two mathematicians have found what they say is a hole at the heart of a proof that has convulsed the mathematics community for nearly six years.

When Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in the early 1990s, his proof was hailed as a monumental step forward not just for mathematicians but for all of humanity. The theorem is simplicity ...

Since the mid-20th century mathematicians have tried to develop an alternative to set theory in which it would be more natural to do mathematics in terms of equivalence. In 1945 the mathematicians ...