By digging out signals hidden within the brain's electrical chatter, scientists are getting new insights into sleep, aging and more.

A group of MIT undergraduates is searching for tetrahedra that tile space, the latest effort in a millennia-long inquiry. They've already made a new discovery.

Sometimes the act of solving a puzzle can itself reveal hidden insights.

A new study shows that extreme black holes could break the famous "no-hair" theorem, and in a way that we could detect.

Po-Shen Loh has harnessed his competitive impulses and iconoclastic tendencies to reinvigorate the U.S. Math Olympiad program.

One black hole is nice, but astrophysicists can do a lot more science with 50 of them.

The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn't work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could.

A new proof demonstrates the power of arithmetic dynamics, an emerging discipline that combines insights from number theory and dynamical systems.

An overlooked but powerful driver of cloud formation could accelerate the loss of polar sea ice.

Twenty years ago, physicists set out to investigate a mysterious asymmetry in the proton's interior. Their results, published today, show how antimatter helps stabilize every atom's core.

Researchers are tracking the different strains of SARS-CoV-2 and studying how they spread through our population and our bodies.

To the surprise of experts in the field, a postdoctoral statistician has solved one of the most important problems in high-dimensional convex geometry.

In a second season of enlightened conversations, Steven Strogatz and leading researchers nourish our pandemic-starved minds.

A new thought experiment indicates that quantum mechanics doesn't work without strange numbers that turn negative when squared.

A former graduate student reflects on how Isadore Singer, who died on February 11, brought together mathematicians, physicists and anyone else interested in the deeper connections between diverse fiel

By harnessing randomness, a new algorithm achieves a fundamentally novel — and faster — way of performing one of the most basic computations in math and computer science.

Scientists have struggled to formulate a universal definition of life. Is it possible they don't need one?

Spurred on by quantum experiments that scramble the ordering of causes and their effects, some physicists are figuring out how to abandon causality altogether.

Enter the world of perfect numbers and explore the mystery mathematicians have spent thousands of years trying to solve.

An unexpected superconductor was beginning to look like a fluke, but a new theory and a second discovery has revealed that emergent quasiparticles may be behind the effect.