New Calculations Show How to Escape Hawking's Black Hole Paradox

Plus: Mathematicians find ninth Dedekind number; Maverick genes jump between species; Tracing genetic surprises; What loneliness does to the brain

Math and Science News from Quanta Magazine View this email in your browser THEORETICAL PHYSICS | ALL TOPICS   Quantum Complexity Shows How to Escape Hawking's Black Hole Paradox By CHARLIE WOOD Recent calculations suggest that the firewalls of black holes represent a "complexity frontier" at which all semiclassical bets are off. Read the article SET THEORY   Ninth Dedekind Number Found by Two Independent Groups By RACHEL CROWELL The numbers count a variety of seemingly unrelated mathematical structures. Read the blog Related:  Google Researcher, Long Out of Math, Cracks Devilish Problem About Sets By Kevin Hartnett GENOMICS   Selfish, Virus-Like DNA Can Carry Genes Between Species By SAUGAT BOLAKHE Genetic elements called Mavericks could be responsible for DNA swaps between species. Read the blog Related:  DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often. By Christie Wilcox (2021) QUANTIZED COLUMNS   How Genetic Surprises Complicate the Old Doctrine of DNA By C. BRANDON OGBUNU For over a century, biologists have had to contend with a complicated picture of genetics, which they've only recently begun to understand. Read the article QUANTA SCIENCE PODCAST   Gene Expression in Neurons Solves a Brain Evolution Puzzle Story by MARTA ZARASKA; Podcast hosted by SUSAN VALOT Feelings of loneliness prompt changes in the brain that further isolate people from social contact. Listen to the podcast Read the article Around the Web Burning Questions  Suppression of wildfires can lead to larger, more intense megafires. And an increase in them can endanger animals that are better adapted to lower intensity burns, Katherine Harmon Courage reports for Nautilus. In 2021, Carrie Arnold reported for Quanta on the biodiversity that can flourish when a landscape has the right balance between low- and high-intensity wildfires, allowing fire-adapted species like woodpeckers and Ponderosa pines to thrive. Euclid's First Shots Euclid, an ESA spacecraft that launched a month ago to delve into the nature of dark matter and the accelerating universe, has sent back its first test images. Monisha Ravisetti reports for Space.com on what the images show. During its mission, Euclid will gather 170 million gigabytes of data. In 2018, Siobhan Roberts interviewed Valeria Pettorino of CosmoStat, a theoretical cosmologist and data scientist who worked on Euclid, for Quanta. Follow Quanta Simons Foundation 160 5th Avenue, 7th Floor New York, NY 10010 Unsubscribe | About Quanta Privacy Policy | Terms | Contact Us   Copyright © 2023 Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of the Simons Foundation