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.

The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ripple across an ecosystem.

Has the secret to understanding gravity been hiding in plain sight for nearly 50 years?

Encouraged by successes in understanding black holes, theoretical physicists are applying what they’ve learned to whole universes. What they’re finding has them questioning fundamental assumptions about how physics ought to be done.

Denoscriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms.

The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing.

The supercollider is now being used to explore quantum phenomena, including a “magic” form of quantum entanglement.

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact logically equivalent.

By combining the language of groups with that of geometry and linear algebra, Marius Sophus Lie created one of math’s most powerful tools.

Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a language network in the human brain — and has found some similarities to LLMs.

A newly proposed explanation for the slipperiness of ice has revived a centuries-long debate.