Quanta Magazine
371 episodes listed below
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Exploring the distant universe, the insides of cells, the abstractions of math, the complexity of information itself, and much more, The Quanta Podcast is a tour of the frontier between the known and the unknown. In each episode, Quanta Magazine Editor-in-Chief Samir Patel speaks with the minds behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math. Quanta specifically covers fundamental research — driven by curiosity, discovery and the overwhelming desire to know why and how. Join us every Tuesday for a stimulating conversation about the biggest ideas and the tiniest details. (If...
Factory robots handle eggs; humanoid demos still have some explaining to do if you're watching closely.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A nuclear pore's shifting interior makes tiny cellular machinery feel newly mysterious.
The Quanta Podcast uses the nuclear pore complex to show how familiar biology can still hide difficult mysteries. Samir Patel frames Yasmin Saplakolu's reporting around a molecular machine in cells, where intrinsically disordered proteins help form a shifting space inside the…
A clear, thoughtful episode on what mathematical rigor gains, and what it can leave harder to see, when computers enter proof.
The Quanta Podcast takes up a live tension in modern mathematics: how much formal structure sharpens thought, and when that structure begins to get in the way of the ideas it is meant to serve.
A clear look at why humanoid robots can impress in demos while still struggling with real-world dexterity.
Humanoid robots can move confidently through a demo and still stumble over the small physical adjustments that make useful work possible. The Quanta Podcast follows that gap through John Pavlis's look at advances over the last 10 years or so, then focuses on dexterity: force,…
A grounded look at how GPT-3 changed what NLP researchers could do and inspect.
Natural language processing gets its asteroid moment in this carefully shaped account of how modern language models unsettled the field. Samir Patel, Quanta Magazine's editor in chief, follows the path from ELIZA's therapist script to GPT-2 and GPT-3, making clear why GPT-3's…
A thoughtful tour of infinity, axioms and the uneasy border between mathematical order and unpredictability.
The Quanta Podcast treats infinity as a stress test for mathematics' belief in order. Samir Patel, Quanta Magazine's editor-in-chief, speaks with Jordana Sapelewicz, the editor of Greg Barber's story, about whether mathematical rules disclose structure or keep producing results…
A clear look at how the brain turns experience into narrative memory scaffolds.
It follows how the human brain turns lived moments into narrative memory by building neural scripts, the mental scaffolds that help people hold onto experiences like an airport trip or a marriage proposal.
Steven Novella and a rotating panel dissect weekly science news and debunk pseudoscience claims.
Bob McDonald anchors weekly multi-segment interviews on new research, from cricket courtship to moon missions.
Vox reporters trace how Botox, brain-speech implants, and scientific disputes actually happened.
The Quanta Podcast covers cognitive neuroscientist Christopher Baldassano’s research at Columbia University on how the brain constructs narrative memories using standardized “event scripts.” Using fMRI brain scanning and machine learning to analyze people watching films, Baldassano’s lab discovered that the brain maintains neural fingerprints for familiar event sequences—a trip through an airport, a restaurant meal, a marriage proposal—that serve as scaffolding onto which specific episodic details are attached.
This episode explores how smell, an ancient sense linked to memory, is studied through linguistics and neuroscience, featuring insights from Quanta staff writer Yasmin Saplakolu on creative scientific approaches to understanding its abstract nature and human connections.
Samir Patel and Yasmin Saplakolu examine the nuclear pore complex, a molecular gateway built from hundreds of proteins of 30 types.
The Quanta Podcast examines how formalization creates shared definitions and logical checks while potentially narrowing the intuitive and creative practices of mathematics.
This episode discusses how AI is designing novel experimental protocols for physics, focusing on the LIGO gravitational wave detector and its optimization.
Samir Patel interviews Quanta science writer John Pavlis about why humanoid robots have improved since the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge but still struggle with dexterity and force control.
The Quanta Podcast's Samir Patel interviews science journalist John Pavlis about how ChatGPT overturned natural language processing, a field that traces back to Joseph Weisenbaum's 1966 chatbot ELIZA.
The Quanta Podcast examines whether mathematics is fundamentally orderly or whether undecidable statements and exotic infinities make its foundations unpredictable.
The Quanta Podcast examines whether color vision evolved before colorful signals such as fruit, flowers, warning patterns, and mating displays.
The Quanta Podcast host Samir Patel interviews science journalist George Musser about entropic gravity, the proposal that gravity emerges from entropy rather than acting as a fundamental force.
The Quanta Podcast's Samir Patel and computer science writer Ben Brubaker explain how an online group solved the fifth Busy Beaver problem after narrowing 17 trillion five-rule Turing machines.
The Quanta Podcast examines “The Mysterious Math of Turbulence” through host Samir Patel's interview with Quanta math writer Joe Howlett.
Concept cells may be the brain's memory-building blocks, linking abstract ideas like words in a sentence.
This episode explores a new experiment challenging the standard understanding of electric current in strange metals.
This episode explores how researchers are using synthetic children's stories to understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing.
Astronomers discover free-floating worlds that blur the line between star and planet, challenging theories of formation.
This episode explores the mystery of what governs the varied timing of growth and aging across different species, focusing on recent research suggesting cells use metabolic processes as clocks.