Shalma Wegsman is the spring 2025 writing fellow at Quanta Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in physics from New York University and is a co-host of the podcast Why This Universe?

Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights ...

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating ...

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature. Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more ...

What is the deepest level of reality? In this Quanta explainer, Vijay Balasubramanian, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, takes us on a journey through space-time to investigate what it’s ...

By proving a broader version of Hilbert’s famous 10th problem, two groups of mathematicians have expanded the realm of ...

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Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities.

Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language. By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, linguists can use neural networks to explore how people learn. Researchers got ...

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. A new proof marks the ...