The New Historian of the Smash That Made the Himalayas
By ROBIN GEORGE ANDREWS
Around 67 million years ago, a massive volcanic plume propelled the Indian microcontinent into Eurasia, forming the Himalayas — or so the theory went. In a new interview, geologist Lucía Pérez-Díaz explains how she disproved this theory.
Hosted by STEVEN STROGATZ; Produced by DANA BIALEK
Chemotherapy causes collateral damage throughout the body, even as it kills cancer cells. Trachette Jackson specializes in using mathematics to improve the precision with which therapies hit only their targets.
Fairies, Bacteria or Termites? Strikingly round patches of bare ground known as "fairy circles" may form because bacteria in the soil make it hard for seeds to sprout, Veronique Greenwood reports for The New York Times. This isn't the first explanation for fairy circles based on ecological interactions. The Princeton University mathematician Corina Tarnita described how resource competition among termites could explain the circles in a 2017 interview with Quanta.
Standard Bearers The discoveries of the neutron and the positron nearly a century ago rocked physicists' view of reality and paved the way for nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, Emily Conover writes for Science News. They also launched a revolution that eventually became the Standard Model, the most complete census (so far) of reality's particles. Explore the theory's structure in this Quanta visualization.