Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color ...

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture. In 360 BCE, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an ...

Eric James Beyer is a science writer whose work explores the intersections of technology, the natural world, and human identity. He has written for Interesting Engineering, The Bosphorus Review ...

Following the clues from black holes, physicists have pursued multiple approaches to understanding how space-time emerges from more microscopic components.The leading approach takes off from what’s ...

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder calculated in 1939 that if a perfectly spherical star gravitationally collapses to a point, its matter will become so dense that it will stretch space-time ...

S ince the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

I n June 1978, the organizers of a large mathematics conference in Marseille, France, announced a last-minute addition to the program. During the lunch hour, the mathematician Roger Apéry would ...

One morning last November, the mathematician Hector Pasten finally solved the problem that had been dogging him for more than a decade by using a time-tested productivity hack: procrastination.. He ...

Now Figueiredo’s conspiracy is another manifestation of abstract geometric structure that seems to underlie particle physics. “The overall program is inching closer to Nima’s long-term dream of ...

Dictionary of Duality . To see how two theories can secretly say the same things, you need a dictionary to translate between them. The rabbit-duck dictionary, for instance, would establish that “ear” ...

The year’s biggest computer science stories included a new understanding of large language models, and a breakthrough in being able to compute complex quantum systems. We look back at three of the ...

At 11:30 one night in May 2024, a graduate student, Chuankun Zhang, saw a signal that physicists have sought for 50 years. As a peak rose from the static on his monitor at the research institute JILA ...