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 ...

Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond. His two theorems destroyed the search ...

In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism. Intuition ...

With her homeland mired in war, the sphere-packing number theorist Maryna Viazovska has become the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history. How to safely reopen offices, ...

It should be possible, but getting there will require a greater understanding of subsurface physics. What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting. Armed with a slew of new ...

Fifty years ago, Paul Erdős and two other mathematicians came up with a graph theory problem that they thought they might solve on the spot. A team of mathematicians has finally settled it. In the ...

To stay healthy, humans and some other animals rely on a complex community of bacteria in their guts. But research is starting to show that those partnerships might be more the exception than the rule ...