Through his encyclopedic study of the electron, an obscure figure named Stefano Laporta found a handle on the subatomic world’s fearsome complexity. His algorithm has swept the field.

A mathematical model shows how a thermodynamic mechanism could have made protocells split in two.

By carefully constructing a multidimensional and well-connected graph, a team of researchers has finally created a long-sought locally testable code that can immediately betray whether it’s been…

The solution to our puzzle about Euler’s number explains why e pops up in situations that involve optimality.

The spate of furious wildfires around the world during the past decade has revealed to ecologists how much biodiversity and “pyrodiversity” go hand in hand.

No matter how much we’d like to eradicate SARS-CoV-2, it may be better to settle for other forms of control.

One of the first goals of quantum computing has been to recreate bizarre quantum systems that can’t be studied in an ordinary computer. A dark-horse quantum simulator has now done just that.

The James Webb Space Telescope has the potential to rewrite the history of the cosmos and reshape humanity’s position within it. But first, a lot of things have to work just right.

Rapid advances in large-scale connectomics are beginning to spotlight the importance of individual variations in the neural circuitry. They also highlight the limitations of “wiring diagrams” alone.

Tiny amounts of artificial noise can fool neural networks, but not humans. Some researchers are looking to neuroscience for a fix.

The “gravitational memory effect” predicts that a passing gravitational wave should forever alter the structure of space-time. Physicists have linked the phenomenon to fundamental cosmic symmetries…

More than 30 years ago, Andreas Floer changed geometry. Now, two mathematicians have finally figured out how to extend his revolutionary perspective.

A central pillar of cosmology — the universe is the same everywhere and in all directions — is surviving a storm of possible evidence against it.

When scientists discover genes linked to dangerous illnesses in their samples, how should they convey that news to the donors? The geneticist Cristen Willer had to tackle that challenge.

A new paper shows how to create longer disordered strings than mathematicians had thought possible, proving that a well-known recent conjecture is “spectacularly wrong.”…

It’s simple enough for AI to seem to comprehend data, but devising a true test of a machine’s knowledge has proved difficult.

Scientists have never been able to adequately explain where lightning comes from. Now the first detailed observations of its emergence inside a cloud have exposed how electric fields grow strong…

The detailed understanding of brains and multicellular bodies reached new heights this year, while the genomes of the COVID-19 virus and various organisms yielded more surprises.

Mathematicians and computer scientists answered major questions in topology, set theory and even physics, even as computers continued to grow more capable.

Decades ago, a mathematician posed a warmup problem for some of the most difficult questions about prime numbers. It turned out to be just as difficult to solve, until now.