The Quanta Podcast

Why Are Waves So Hard to Grasp?

Sleep Is Not All or Nothing

Audio Edition: A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting

The Mystery of Early Universe’s Little Red Dots

A Biography of Earth Across the Age of Animals

Audio Edition: ‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle

What We Learn From Running ‘Life’ in Reverse

The Math of Catastrophe

Audio Edition: Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems

What Can a Cell Remember?

Climate Modeling Is at a Crossroads

Audio Edition: A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems

AI's Dark Side Is Only a Nudge Away

How We Came To Know Earth

Audio Edition: ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture

How a 17-Year-Old Solved a Major Math Mystery

Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface

Audio Edition: The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’

A New Quantum Math of Cryptography

How an Outsider Optimized Sphere-Packing

Audio Edition: Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

‘It’s a Mess’: A Brain-Bending Trip to Quantum Theory’s 100th Birthday Party

How Smell Guides Our Inner World

Audio Edition: How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field

Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?

Audio Edition: After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem

When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color?

Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?

Audio Edition: How Noether’s Theorem Revolutionized Physics

How Amateurs Solved a Major Computer Science Puzzle

The Mysterious Math of Turbulence

Audio Edition: Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build Memories

Birds' Migratory Mitochondria

Singularities Are Hard to Kill

Audio Edition: Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case.

In Computers, Memory Is More Useful Than Time

Math and Beauty in the Age of AI

Audio Edition: Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way.

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK

Introducing The Quanta Podcast

Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold

Fish Have a Brain Microbiome. Could Humans Have One Too?

Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound

It Might Be Possible to Detect Gravitons After All

How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero

The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology

The Cellular Secret to Resisting the Pressure of the Deep Sea

Computer Scientists Prove That Heat Destroys Quantum Entanglement

Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect