The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.

Black holes are inescapable traps for most of what falls into them — but there can be exceptions. The theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind speaks with co-host Janna Levin about the black hole information paradox and how it has propelled modern physics.

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community.

Founding editor-in-chief Thomas Lin looks back at a decade of Quanta journalism and forward to what’s next for the magazine.

By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems.

Mathematicians think abstract tools from a field called symplectic geometry might help with planning missions to far-off moons and planets.

The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely how much pleasure and pain animals experience during different forms of touch.

Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade.

For an important problem, it seemed as though laboriously trying every possibility was the best possible approach. Now researchers have proved that there’s a better way.

A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness.

Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes.

Using machine learning, string theorists are finally showing how microscopic configurations of extra dimensions translate into sets of elementary particles — though not yet those of our universe.

More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems. Has the powerful metaphor lost its mathematical meaning?

Human nutrition begins with milk, but the wondrous biofluid does much more than feed babies. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz speaks with molecular nutritionist Elizabeth Johnson about her research into the impact of human milk on a healthy microbiome.

The computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “meaning” into concrete, testable ideas.

The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity.

Four mathematicians broke a 75-year-old record by finding a denser way to pack high-dimensional spheres.

After years of false starts, a team of computer scientists has found a way to efficiently deduce the Hamiltonian of a physical system at any constant temperature.

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size.

In 1940 André Weil wrote a letter to his sister, Simone, outlining his vision for translating between three distinct areas of mathematics. Eighty years later, it still animates many of the most exciting developments in the field.

Perhaps dark matter is made of an entirely different kind of particle than the ones physicists have been searching for. New experiments are springing up to look for these ultra-lightweight phantoms.