Few experiences on the road are more perplexing than phantom traffic jams. Most of us have experienced one: The vehicle ahead of you suddenly brakes, forcing you to brake, and making…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has overplayed his hand this time and is left looking, well, klueless.Photograph by Salzburg Global Seminar / FlickrSince the midterm elections, a feud has been…

Mathematicians long wondered whether it’s possible to express the number 33 as the sum of three cubes—that is, whether the equation 33 = x³+ y³+ z³ has a solution. They knew…

The 2020 Democratic candidates are out of the gate and the pollsters have the call! Bernie Sanders is leading by two lengths with Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren right behind, but…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Astronomers claim in a new paper that star motions should make it easy for civilizations to spread across the galaxy,…

In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the study of geometry using algebra. Around 1637, René…

Theoretical physicists have known since the 1930s that quantum gravity is necessary to bring order into the laws of nature, but 80 years on, a solution isn’t anywhere in sight.Photograph…

You can find Lynda Woods Cleary playing Scrabble every Tuesday at a Panera in Princeton, NJ. Cleary, a 68-year-old retired financial consultant, has been playing every week for 20…

Nowadays, the words “artificial intelligence” seem to be on practically everyone’s lips, from Elon Musk to Henry Kissinger. At least a dozen countries have mounted major AI initiatives,…

When it comes to using computers to steal money, few can come close to matching the success of Russian hacker Evgeniy Bogachev. The $3 million bounty the FBI has offered for Bogachev’s…