A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects.

Mathematicians using the computer program Lean have verified the accuracy of a difficult theorem at the cutting edge of research mathematics.

Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.

Showy male competitions over mating privileges have grabbed scientists’ attention more often, but new work hints that sexual selection is also widespread among females.

By focusing on relationships between solutions to polynomial equations, rather than the exact solutions themselves, Évariste Galois changed the course of modern mathematics.

Brown dwarfs such as “The Accident” are illuminating the murky borderlands that separate planets from stars.

A pair of researchers has shown that trying to classify groups of numbers called “torsion-free abelian groups” is as hard as it can possibly be.

Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale.

When Steven Weinberg died last month, the world lost one of its most profound thinkers.

The unambiguous discovery of a Wigner crystal relied on a novel technique for probing the insides of complex materials.

The evolution of a defensive gland in beetles shows how organs can arise from novel cells carving out new functional niches for their neighbors.

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem.

By showing that even large objects can exhibit bizarre quantum behaviors, physicists hope to illuminate the mystery of quantum collapse, identify the quantum nature of gravity, and perhaps even make…

Researchers are turning to the mathematics of higher-order interactions to better model the complex connections within their data.

The five-decade-old paradox — long thought key to linking quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of gravity — is falling to a new generation of thinkers. Netta Engelhardt is leading the way.

Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are…

How readers used their geometry skills to survive a dangerous puzzle.

One of the strangest results in mathematics explains how it’s possible to turn one sphere into two identical copies, simply by rearranging its pieces.

New work shows that neurons and other brain cells use DNA double-strand breaks, often associated with cancer, neurodegeneration and aging, to quickly express genes related to learning and memory.

Investigations of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations — as well as insights into the nature of time itself.