The visual systems of chitons, a type of marine mollusk, represent a rare real-world example of path-dependent evolution — where a lineage’s history irrevocably shapes its future trajectory. Adam Mustafa/iStock IntroductionBiologists have often wondered what would happen if they could rewind the tape of life’s history and let evolution play out all...

Peter Greenwood for Quanta Magazine IntroductionTime seems linear to us: We remember the past, experience the present and predict the future, moving consecutively from one moment to the next. But why is it that way, and could time ultimately be a kind of illusion? In this episode, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek speaks with host Steven...

Valentin Tkach for Quanta Magazine IntroductionA team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach won’t displace the huge models that undergird the biggest apps, it could reveal more about how these programs understand language....

Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine IntroductionRepetition doesn’t always have to be humdrum. In mathematics, it is a powerful force, capable of generating bewildering complexity. Even after decades of study, mathematicians find themselves unable to answer questions about the repeated execution of very simple rules — the most basic “dynamical systems.”...

Are certain quantum systems eternal, or do they just appear to be so? Nash Weerasekera for Quanta Magazine IntroductionIt is a truth of both physics and everyday experience that things fall apart. Ice melts. Buildings crumble. Any object, if you wait long enough, gets mixed up with itself and its surroundings beyond recognition. But beginning in...

Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine IntroductionIf 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...