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

An organized tide of brain waves, blood and spinal fluid pulsing through a sleeping brain may flush away neural toxins that cause Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

A study challenged the evidence for the mysterious antigravitational force known as dark energy. Then cosmologists shot back.

Researchers have spent centuries looking for a scenario in which the Euler fluid equations fail. Now a mathematician has finally found one.

Snow crystals come in two main types. The “pope” of snowflake physics has a new theory that explains why.

Mathematicians and computer scientists made big progress in number theory, graph theory, machine learning and quantum computing, even as they reexamined our

Researchers explored the zone between life and death, charted the mind’s system for arranging ideas and memories and learned how life’s complexity emerged.

Physicists saw a black hole for the first time, debated the expansion rate of the universe, pondered the origin of time and modeled the end of clouds.

To scientists’ surprise, blended mixtures of cytoplasm can reorganize themselves into cell-like compartments with working structural components.

In evolution, context is everything: Bacteria with neighbors evolve to rebuff viruses in a different way.

Giant blobs nestled deep in the Earth may influence everything from the structure of island chains to mass-extinction events.

No one knows how to find the smallest shape that can cover all other shapes of a certain width. But high school geometry is getting us closer to an answer.

The laws of physics stay the same no matter one’s perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.

A startling experimental discovery about how fluids behave started a wave of important mathematical proofs.

The dendritic arms of some human neurons can perform logic operations that once seemed to require whole neural networks.