How a young celebrity became one of the first female astronomers at Caltech, befriended Richard Feynman, and ended up the world’s foremost chronicler of the science of the night sky.

Virginia Trimble discusses how astronomy has changed over the course of her half-century career. Read the full interview here: https://www.quantamagazine.org...

Mathematicians have figured out exactly how many moves it takes to randomize a 15 puzzle.

Three physicists stumbled across an unexpected relationship between some of the most ubiquitous objects in math.

Taste and smell receptors in unexpected organs monitor the state of the body’s natural microbial health and raise an alarm over invading parasites.

After millions of games, machine learning algorithms found creative solutions and unexpected new strategies that could transfer to the real world.

Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists toward a misstep in Stephen Hawking’s legendary black hole analysis.

Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can’t be overcome with good design alone.

A surprisingly youthful estimate of the age of the rings has stirred a backlash.

Readers’ modifications of a bean machine showed how deterministic laws are capable of producing random-seeming behavior.

We finally know how big a set of numbers can get before it has to contain a pattern known as a “polynomial progression.”

New research makes a molecular connection between the brain and aging — and shows that overactive neurons can shorten life span.

Physicists have long searched for hypothesized dark matter particles called WIMPs. Now, focus may be shifting to the axion — an ultra-lightweight particle whose

For the first time, physicists have calculated exactly what kind of singularity lies at the center of a realistic black hole.

Smallpox was eradicated relatively quickly, but other diseases have proved harder to eliminate. The reasons are a mix of biology and psychology.

New studies help to explain how microbes in the gut can shape a host’s fear responses.

Many of us are drawn to beauty in mathematics. But is that the way nature really works?

By considering simple symmetries, physicists working on the “bootstrap” have rederived the four known forces. “There’s just no freedom in the laws of physics,” said one.

Machine learning and deep neural networks can capture and analyze the “language” of animal behavior in ways that go beyond what’s humanly possible.

Mathematicians regard the Collatz conjecture as a quagmire and warn each other to stay away. But now Terence Tao has made more progress than anyone in decades.

After a space telescope disintegrated, astrophysicists had little hope of understanding how supermassive black holes agitate giant galaxies. Then they invented