Sizing up patternless sets is hard, so mathematicians rely on simple bounds to help answer their questions.

Einstein’s equations describe three canonical configurations of space-time. Now one of these three — important in the study of quantum gravity — has been shown

Anyons don’t fit into either of the two known particle kingdoms. To find them, physicists had to erase the third dimension.

Newly discovered worlds of microbes far beneath the ocean floor, inside old basaltic rocks, could point to a greater likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe.

Vesselin Dimitrov’s proof of the Schinzel-Zassenhaus conjecture quantifies the way special values of polynomials push each other apart.

A lizard that both lays eggs and gives birth to live young is helping scientists understand how and why these forms of reproduction evolved.

It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway

After translating some of math’s complicated equations, researchers have created an AI system that they hope will answer even bigger questions.

Studies of collective behavior usually focus on how crowds of organisms coordinate their actions. But what if the individuals that don’t participate have just as much to tell us?

Readers poked holes in our paradoxical April Fools’ Day claims about perpetual energy and whether this puzzle solution would ever be published.

Collider physicists report that several measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their

Neuroscientists could use brain waves to spur immune cells into action against the disease — but the process is almost too fantastic to believe.

By chewing on the problems posed by “extremal” black holes, physicists have exposed a surprising and universal connection between energy and entropy.

Mathematicians try to figure out when problems can be solved using current knowledge — and when they have to chart a new path instead.

To distinguish between fundamentally different objects, mathematicians turn to invariants that encode the objects’ essential features.

Neural networks have been taught to quickly read the surfaces of proteins — molecules critical to many biological processes.

Going without sleep for too long will kill you but scientists haven’t known why. Newly published work suggests that the answer lies in an unexpected part of the

To explain why men are on average taller than women, scientists theorized about competition for mates. But the effects of estrogen on bone growth may be answer enough.

Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics.

After a burst lit up their telescope “like a Christmas tree,” astronomers were able to finally track down the source of these cosmic oddities.

The nervous systems of foraging and predatory animals may prompt them to move along a special kind of random path called a Lévy walk to find food efficiently