Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter ...

The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy ...

Those scientists saved countless lives, but their forecast was more of an educated guess than it might have appeared. It was ...

The sunlight-collecting organelles known as chloroplasts solve a packing problem: how to optimize photosynthesis without ...

A graduate student recently harnessed the complexity of mathematical proofs to create a powerful new tool in cryptography.

One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science. How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory When pigeons ...

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a ...

In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program. A group of nine mathematicians has proved the ...

In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out to investigate the potential future of a planet on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. He started by looking some 600 ...

Every experience we have changes our brain, the way a ceramicist reshapes a slab of clay. Every corner we turn, every conversation we have, every shudder we feel causes cascading effects: Chemicals ...

His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences. In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt ...