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.

By watching “minimal” cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can be too simple to evolve.

Mathematicians thought they were on the cusp of proving a conjecture about the ancient structures known as Apollonian circles. But a summer project would lead to its downfall.

New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But recent James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts.

Why did mammals, grasses and some other groups of organisms explode in diversity only after millions of years? The evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner plumbs the secrets of those “sleeping beauties.”

For a half century, mathematicians have tried to define the exact circumstances under which a black hole is destined to exist. A new proof shows how a cube can help answer the question.

How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.

In their jiggles and shakes, red giant stars encode a record of the magnetic fields near their cores.

The telescope conjecture gave mathematicians a handle on ways to map one sphere to another. Now that it has been disproved, the universe of shapes has exploded.

Researchers have discovered ways around a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and beauty in digital images.