A novel form of immunological memory that was mostly ignored for a century extends the benefits of vaccines. It could be of help in ending the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two computer scientists found — in the unlikeliest of places — just the idea they needed to make a big leap in graph theory.

Renormalization has become perhaps the single most important advance in theoretical physics in 50 years.

Computer scientists are trying to build an AI system that can win a gold medal at the world’s premier math competition.

Despite recent progress on the notorious Collatz conjecture, we still don’t know whether a number can escape its infinite loop.

It was an old idea of Stephen Hawking’s: Unseen “primordial” black holes might be the hidden dark matter. A new series of studies has shown how the theory can

New research finds that the subjective experience of time is linked to learning, thwarted expectations and neural fatigue.

The medical research scientist and Quanta puzzle columnist Pradeep Mutalik explores how to make sense of COVID-19 data while managing your personal risk.

To tame urban traffic, the computer scientist Carlos Gershenson finds that letting transportation systems adapt and self-organize often works better than trying to predict and control them.

Subtle aberrations in the clockwork blinking of stars could become “the result of the century.” That’s if the distortions are produced by a network of giant filaments left over from the birth of the universe.

Researchers have shown how to effectively transform one material into another using a finely shaped laser pulse.

A small community of mathematicians is using a software program called Lean to build a new digital repository. They hope it represents the future of their field

Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the cause of a major liver disease.

Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies of black holes.

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of CRISPR/Cas9 genetic editing.

After 44 years, there’s finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem.

The ingredients for reactions ancestral to metabolism could have formed very easily in the primordial soup, new work suggests.

The physicist Jeff Gore tests theories about microbe communities experimentally and finds new rules governing ecological stability.

Physicists have reached a long-sought goal. The catch is that their room-temperature superconductor requires crushing pressures to keep from falling apart.

Have fun exploring a numerical puzzle, a geometric puzzle and a game of random patterns, all inspired by the playful genius of the legendary mathematician.

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory.