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.

A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an audience. It crowned no winners — but it can still claim progress.

Quantum computing is still really, really hard. But the rise of a powerful class of error-correcting codes suggests that the task might be slightly more feasible than many feared.

Sticking out your tongue while doing delicate work with your hands reveals a history of evolutionary relationships.

Astronomers are scouring the cosmos for fingerprints of the invisible — tiny clumps of pure dark matter that might solve a long-standing cosmic mystery.

New research finds that the memories useful for future generalizations are held in the brain separately from those recording unusual events.