Mathematicians can often figure out what happens as quantities grow infinitely large. What about when they are just a little big?

For decades, physicists have struggled to develop a quantum theory of gravity. But what if gravity — and space-time — are fundamentally classical?

A new proof marks major progress toward solving the Kakeya conjecture, a deceptively simple question that underpins a tower of conjectures.

Extreme microorganisms carpeting the Atacama Desert in Chile illuminate how life might have first taken hold on Earth’s surface.

Abnormal waves of electrical activity can cause a heart’s muscle cells to beat out of sync. In this episode, Flavio Fenton, an expert in cardiac dynamics, talks with Steve Strogatz about ways to treat heart arrhythmias without resorting to painful defibrillators.

A new algorithm brings together the advantages of randomness and deterministic processes to reliably construct large prime numbers.

In some deep subterranean aquifers, cells have a chemical trick for making oxygen that could sustain whole underground ecosystems.

By treating Earth as a topological insulator — a state of quantum matter — physicists found a powerful explanation for the movements of the planet’s air and seas.

A new result shows how much of the plane can be colored by points that are never exactly one unit apart.

Quantum algorithms can find their way out of mazes exponentially faster than classical ones, at the cost of forgetting the path they took. A new result suggests that the trade-off may be inevitable.

Knowing a little about the local connections on flight maps and other networks can reveal a lot about a system’s global structure.

The proof establishes new conditions that cause connected oscillators to sway in sync.

By measuring the universe’s emptiest spaces, scientists can study how matter clumps together and how fast it flies apart.

The reshuffling of neurons during fruit fly metamorphosis suggests that larval memories don’t persist in adults.

Even empty space bubbles with energy, according to quantum mechanics — and that fact affects almost every facet of physical reality. The theoretical physicist Isabel Garcia Garcia explains to Steven Strogatz why it’s so important in modern physics to understand…

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure our digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

For over a century, biologists have had to contend with a complicated picture of genetics, which they’ve only recently begun to understand.

The numbers count a variety of seemingly unrelated mathematical structures.

Inside of a black hole, the two theoretical pillars of 20th-century physics appear to clash. Now a group of young physicists think they have resolved the conflict by appealing to the central pillar of the new century — the physics of quantum information.

Genetic elements called Mavericks that have some viral features could be responsible for the large-scale smuggling of DNA between species.

New observations of a faraway rocky world that might have its own magnetic field could help astronomers understand the seemingly haphazard magnetic fields swaddling our solar system’s planets.