A newfound hub of immune system activity at the back of the brain solves a century-old puzzle.

Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.

Glycans, the complex sugars that stud cellular surfaces, are like a language that life uses to mediate vital interactions. Researchers are learning how to read their meaning.

An enigmatic connection between the forces of nature is allowing physicists to explore gravity’s quantum side.

A new proposal would use quantum hard drives to combine the light of multiple telescopes, letting astronomers create incredibly high-resolution optical images.

Math teachers have stymied students for hundreds of years by sticking goats in strangely shaped fields. Learn why one grazing goat problem has stumped mathematicians for more than a century.

New work shows that histones, long treated as boring spools for DNA, sit at the center of the origin story of eukaryotes and continue to play important roles in evolution and disease.

Originally devised as a rigorous means of counting holes, homology provides a scaffolding for mathematical ideas, allowing for a new way to analyze the shapes within data.

Trannoscription factors that act throughout the genome can arise from mashups of transposable elements inserted into established genes.

A mathematical shortcut for analyzing black hole collisions works even in cases where it shouldn’t. As astronomers use it to search for new classes of hidden black holes, others wonder: Why?

Advances in brain-computer interface technology are impressive, but we’re not close to anything resembling mind control.

Studies of sleep are usually neurological. But some of nature’s simplest animals suggest that sleep evolved for metabolic reasons, long before brains even existed.

A pair of mathematicians solved a legendary question about the proportion of vertices in a graph with an odd number of connections.

Supermassive black holes emit jets of white-hot plasma that stretch thousands of light-years across the cosmos. For the first time, researchers have identified what’s creating these jets.

New work suggests that the radiolytic splitting of water supports giant subsurface ecosystems of life on Earth — and could do it elsewhere, too.

Hilbert’s 12th problem asked for novel analogues of the roots of unity, the building blocks for certain number systems. Now, over 100 years later, two mathematicians have produced them.

Groundbreaking results show that neutron stars of different masses may have the same size — upending astrophysical models.

Jordan Ellenberg enjoys studying — and writing about — the mathematics underlying everyday phenomena.

Playing with numbers can lead to deep mathematical and scientific insights.

Scientists have begun to decipher the subtle signs that reveal how explosive a volcanic eruption is going to be.

In some symbiotic partnerships, an RNA-based mechanism may sabotage the growth of greedy hosts.