For most of us, the word “climate” immediately generates thoughts of melting ice, rising seas, wildfires and gathering storms. However, in the course of working to understand this pressing challenge, scientists have revealed so much more: A fundamental understanding of how Earth’s climate works.

Quanta recently published a nine-story series that investigates this basic science. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, senior editor Hannah Waters joins editor in chief Samir Patel to discuss how humans have come to understand our planet.

Crying Glacier Audio Coda by Ludwig Berger, Lutz Stautner and Philipp Becker

The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a whole crop of related problems.

The story ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture first appeared on Quanta Magazine.

In the field of harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates.

Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student named Hannah Cairo solved a 40-year-old mystery about how some of these waves behave, surprising and exciting mathematicians. Cairo has not yet obtained a high school or undergraduate degree, but she recently began a doctoral program at the University of Maryland to continue her already impressive career studying mathematics. In this week's episode, math editor Jordana Cepelewicz joins host Samir Patel to discuss the significance of Cairo's proof.

Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.

In science textbooks, Earth looks like a round layer cake. There's a hard line between the liquid metal core and the putty-like rock mantle. But maybe that boundary is a little fuzzier than we previously thought. Strange, continent sized blobs rest on the dividing line. These blobs are leaching material from the Earth’s core, extending arms out into the mantle, and sending core material up and out through magmatic plumes.

No one's completely sure how it’s happening. On this week’s episode, host Samir Patel and writer Robin George Andrews dig into the ancient isotopic signatures that are helping us better understand the material bubbling up from the depths of our planet. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.

Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.

Audio coda courtesy of wildlife photographers Gudmann & Gyda

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place.

The story How Undergraduate The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine.

We’re living in the golden age of cryptography. Since the 1970s, we've had more confidence in encryption than ever before. But there's a difference between confidence and absolute certainty. And computer scientists care a lot about that difference.

The search is always on for better, more secure secrets. But is it possible for digital security to be truly, provably unbreakable? Maybe, with a little help from math and physics. On this week’s episode, host Samir Patel talks with 𝘘𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢 computer science staff writer Ben Brubaker about a developing frontier of digital security: quantum cryptography. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.

Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.

Audio Coda from the Bletchley Park Trust.

How many oranges can you fit in a box? Mathematicians are obsessed with perfecting their answer to this question in not just our familiar three-dimensional world, but in higher and higher dimensions beyond it. For several decades, they've made only minimal progress toward finding an optimal solution. Then, this past April, an outsider to the field named Boaz Klartag posted a proof that bested these previous records by a significant margin.

In this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel and Quanta math staff writer Joseph Howlett discuss how Klartag resuscitated an old technique that experts had abandoned decades earlier to optimize sphere packing in any arbitrarily high dimension. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.

Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.

Audio coda created by Daniel Simion

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.

The story How Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture first appeared on Quanta Magazine.