The Reykjanes Peninsula has entered a new volcanic era. Innovative efforts to map and monitor the subterranean magma are saving lives.

The pathbreaking geneticist Cassandra Extavour pursues the secrets of multicellular life while balancing careers in both science and singing.

This past October, dozens of mathematicians gathered in Pasadena to create the third version of “Kirby’s list” — a compendium of the most important unsolved problems in the field.

Two researchers have proved that Penrose tilings, famous patterns that never repeat, are mathematically equivalent to a kind of quantum error correction.

A series of advances seemed to promise the impossible: the existence of quantum states that would never, ever fall into disarray. But physicists are now discovering that the pull of disorder may not be so easily overcome.

Simple rules in simple settings continue to puzzle mathematicians, even as they devise intricate tools to analyze them.

Erasing key information during training results in machine learning models that can learn new languages faster and more easily.

Time is all around us: in the language we use, in the memories we revisit and in our predictions of the future. But what exactly is it? The physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek joins Steve Strogatz to discuss the fundamental hallmarks of time.

The visual systems of an obscure group of mollusks provide a rare natural example of path-dependent evolution, in which a critical fork in the creatures’ past determined their evolutionary futures.

By mapping the largest structures in the universe in X-rays, cosmologists have found striking agreement with their standard theoretical model of how the universe evolves.

Mathematicians are working to fully explain unusual behaviors uncovered using artificial intelligence.

How did cells evolve a process to end their own lives? Recent research suggests that apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death, first arose billions of years ago in bacteria with a primitive sociality.

By eliminating a hidden inefficiency, computer scientists have come up with a new way to multiply large matrices that’s faster than ever.

Altering a protein in the neurons that coordinate a rattlesnake’s movement made a slow slither neuron more like a speedy rattle neuron, showing one way evolution can generate new ways of moving.

Researchers have shown that a problem about the energy of a quantum system is easy for quantum computers but hard for classical ones.

The recipient of the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics discusses math as art, math as language, and math as abstract thought.

Teleporting people through space is still science fiction. But quantum teleportation is dramatically different and entirely real. In this episode, Janna Levin interviews the theoretical physicist John Preskill about teleporting bits and the promise of quantum…

Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces and pressures inside a subatomic particle for the first time.

Electroconvulsive therapy is highly effective in treating major depressive disorder, but no one knows why it works. New research suggests it may restore balance between excitation and inhibition in the brain.

Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.

The French mathematician spent decades developing a set of tools now widely used for taming random processes.