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.

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach.

Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms.

The preferred “handedness” of biomolecules could have emerged from biased interactions between electrons and magnetic surfaces, new research suggests.

Scientists have struggled to accurately forecast the strength of the sun’s 11-year cycle — even after centuries of solar observations.

A new proof breaks a decades-long drought of progress on the problem of estimating the size of triangles created by cramming points into a square.

Measurement and entanglement both have a “spooky” nonlocal flavor to them. Now physicists are harnessing that nonlocality to probe the spread of quantum information and control it.

On its surface, the Kakeya conjecture is a simple statement about rotating needles. But it underlies a wealth of mathematics.

Because the areas around adult trees are selectively hostile to their seedlings, more tree species can be packed into tropical forests.

By using “classical shadows,” ordinary computers can beat quantum computers at the tricky task of understanding quantum behaviors.

Every species develops at its own unique tempo, leaving scientists to wonder what governs their timing. A suite of new findings suggests that cells use basic metabolic processes as clocks.

Some modern image generators rely on the principles of diffusion to create images. Alternatives based on the process behind the distribution of charged particles may yield even better results.

To catch even a whiff of the universe’s earliest epochs — an age of darkness, and one of new light — Cynthia Chiang builds her own equipment. Then she deploys it at the ends of the Earth.

Modular forms are one of the most beautiful and mysterious objects in mathematics. What are they?

A new paper establishes a long-conjectured bound about the size of the overlap between sets of lines and points.

Under a microscope, cells in a worm embryo deliberately eliminated one-third of their genome — an uncompromising tactic that may combat harmful genetic parasites.

Exposure to a virus isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. The concept of “infectious dose” suggests ways to keep ourselves safer from harm.