It’s surprisingly difficult to prove one of the most basic properties of a number: whether it can be written as a fraction. A ...

Nanotube bridge networks grow between the most abundant photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans, suggesting that the world is ...

Hypothetical devices that can quickly and accurately answer questions have become a powerful tool in computational complexity ...

Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the ...

The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the astrophysicist and author Janna Levin interview leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time.

Landmark results in geometry and number theory marked an exciting year for mathematics, at a time when advances in artificial intelligence are starting to transform the subject’s future. What Is ...

We look back at three of the biggest biology stories of 2024: a reconstruction of the ancient ancestor of all modern life, the discovery of a neural circuit that regulates the immune system, and ...

Researchers got a better look at the thoughts of chatbots, amateurs learned exactly how complicated simple systems can be, and quantum computers passed an essential milestone. The end of 2024 seems a ...

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world ...

Landmark results in geometry and number theory marked an exciting year for mathematics, at a time when advances in artificial intelligence are starting to transform the subject’s future. The Quanta ...