Using a relatively young theory, a team of mathematicians has started to answer questions whose roots lie at the very beginning of mathematics.

A healthy brain maintains a harmony of neurons that excite or inhibit other neurons, but the lines between different types of cells are blurrier than researchers once thought.

“Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it.

The V-JEPA system uses ordinary videos to understand the physics of the real world.

The amplituhedron, a shape at the heart of particle physics, appears to be deeply connected to the mathematics of paper folding.

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been an early evolutionary development.

The same pulling force that causes “tears” in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It’s another example of how genes exploit mechanical forces for growth and development.

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.

The math of even the simplest ocean waves is notoriously uncooperative. A team of Italian mathematicians has made major advances toward understanding it.

Neuroscientists probing the boundary between sleep and awareness are finding many types of liminal states, which help explain the sleep disorders that can result when sleep transitions go wrong.

The uniquely vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 5 meters. But when that will happen — and how fast — is anything but settled.

Recent findings reveal that even simple pricing algorithms can make things more expensive.

After more than three centuries, a geometry problem that originated with a royal bet has been solved.

Despite their wide variety of sizes, niches and shapes, sharks scale geometrically, pointing to possible fundamental constraints on evolution.

The theoretical physicist and best-selling author finds inspiration in politics and philosophy for rethinking space and time.

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics.

A sudden flash of insight is a product of your brain. Neuroscientists track the neural activity underlying an “aha” and how it might boost memory.

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry.

Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His proofs have been called “disgusting,” but they go beyond what any human can do.

Mathematicians have broken through a long-standing barrier in the study of “minimizing surfaces,” which play an important role in both math and physics.