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.

Physicists have solved a key problem of robotic locomotion by revising the usual rules of interaction between simple component parts.

Without a good definition of life, how do we look for it on alien planets? Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist, and Sheref Mansy, a chemist, to learn more.

June 16, 2022

Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist who became a lifeline for the worried and the curious during the pandemic, thinks that nasal spray vaccines could be the next needed breakthrough in our fight against the coronavirus.

Quantum computers may derive their power from the “magical” way that properties of particles change depending on the context.

A new proof identifies precisely how large a mathematical graph must be before it contains a regular substructure.

Intelligent beings learn by interacting with the world. Artificial intelligence researchers have adopted a similar strategy to teach their virtual agents new tricks.

In recreational mathematics, the balance scale is an endless source of puzzles that require precise and elaborate logic and teach the fundamentals of generalization.