Leslie Lamport revolutionized how computers talk to each other. Now he’s working on how engineers talk to their machines.

“Ribbon concordance” will let mathematicians compare knots by linking them across four-dimensional space.

“Ribbon concordance” will let mathematicians compare knots by linking them across four-dimensional space.

The space telescope is one of the most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken. Marcia Rieke and Nikole Lewis, two of the scientists leading JWST investigations, talk to Steven Strogatz about how it may transform our understanding of the universe.

Synthetic biology experiments suggest a “MultiFate” model for how genetically identical cells become the many different types found in complex organisms like us.

Why verify every line of a proof, when just a few checks will do?

RNA and peptides coevolving in the primordial world might have jointly served as a precursor to the modern ribosome.

A bit of information theory can help you analyze — and improve — your Wordle game.

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.

Four puzzle solutions reveal different ways to divine someone’s hidden number with impossibly little information.

Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers, arguing that the future of computing lies in exploiting the universe’s complex physical behaviors.

How did life arise on Earth? It’s one of the greatest and most ancient mysteries in all of science — and the clues to solving it are all around us. Steven Strogatz speaks with the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak and Betül Kaçar, a paleogeneticist…

The Langlands program provides a beautifully intricate set of connections between various areas of mathematics, pointing the way toward novel solutions for old problems.

Using ideas borrowed from graph theory, two mathematicians have shown that extremely complex surfaces are easy to traverse.

Some animal neuropeptides have been around longer than nervous systems.

Jared Duker Lichtman, 26, has proved a longstanding conjecture relating prime numbers to a broad class of “primitive” sets. To his adviser, it came as a “complete shock.”

The lush biodiversity of the Amazon may be due in part to the dynamics of branching rivers, which serve as invisible fences that continuously barricade and merge bird populations.

Computer scientists can now solve a decades-old problem in practically the time it takes to write it down.

Observations of faraway planets have forced a near-total rewrite of the story of how our solar system came to be.

June 13, 2022

Neuroscientists uncovered an energy-saving mode in vision-system neurons that works at the cost of being able to see fine-grained details.