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 ...

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

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 ...

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core principles didn’t come easily. How do mathematicians decide that something ...

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 ...

Last summer, a wedding photographer walked begrudgingly into a physics laboratory outside Rome. Feeling uninspired by the intricate machinery around him, he decided to turn off the lights. “I wanted ...

In theory, a universe can come in any shape or size, but scientists prefer to think about three basic kinds of universes: one that’s expanding, one that’s collapsing, and one that stays the same. Out ...

David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology. It’s natural to think of math as being fundamentally abstract. Whether it’s invented or discovered, its ...

Robert Hazen and Michael Wong discuss their bold proposal for a new law of nature, centered around the idea that information is as fundamental to the cosmos as mass, energy or charge. Most organic ...