Quanta Podcast – Quanta Magazine

Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Explain Value of Shock Therapy

Elizabeth Landau — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:52:49 +0000

Electroconvulsive therapy has a public relations problem. The treatment, which sends electric currents through the brain to induce a brief seizure, has barbaric, inhumane connotations — for example, it was portrayed as a sadistic punishment in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But for patients with depression that does not improve with medications, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can be...

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Swirling Forces, Crushing Pressures Measured in the Proton

Charlie Wood — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 14:03:46 +0000

Physicists have begun to explore the proton as if it were a subatomic planet. Cutaway maps display newfound details of the particle’s interior. The proton’s core features pressures more intense than in any other known form of matter. Halfway to the surface, clashing vortices of force push against each other. And the “planet” as a whole is smaller than previous experiments had suggested.

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Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information

Ben Brubaker — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 14:50:29 +0000

If you want to tile a bathroom floor, square tiles are the simplest option — they fit together without any gaps in a grid pattern that can continue indefinitely. That square grid has a property shared by many other tilings: Shift the whole grid over by a fixed amount, and the resulting pattern is indistinguishable from the original. But to many mathematicians, such “periodic” tilings are boring.

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Inside Scientists’ Life-Saving Prediction of the Iceland Eruption

Robin George Andrews — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:27:49 +0000

On November 10, 2023, Kristín Jónsdóttir, head of the Icelandic Meteorological Office’s department of volcano research, was having a rare day off. “It was my 50th birthday,” she said. Then everything began to shake. She would spend the day staring at her phone, watching the earthquakes bloom across maps of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. The peninsula experiences fissure eruptions...

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Radio Maps May Reveal the Universe’s Biggest Magnetic Fields

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 14:51:33 +0000

By making maps of the magnetic fields hidden inside massive galaxy clusters, astronomers are getting closer to finding the origin of cosmic magnetism. “These are the first maps of the detailed structure of magnetic fields on an unprecedentedly large scale,” said Alexandre Lazarian, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a co-author on the paper describing the maps...

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