Beneath our awareness, the brain lets certain kinds of stimuli automatically capture our attention by lowering the priority of the rest.

Only 170 million years ago, new plankton evolved. Their demand for carbon and calcium permanently transformed the seas as homes for life.

October 2, 2019

Cells in symbiotic partnership, nested one within the other and functioning like organelles, can borrow from their host’s genes to complete their own metabolic pathways.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine honored William G. Kaelin, Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza for their work on understanding how cells

The astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The cosmologist

John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share in the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on lithium-ion batteries.

Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior.

The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and shape theories of cosmology.

Studies suggest that epigenetics allows some learned adaptive responses to be passed down to new generations. The question is how.

A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. But it's also revealed how far AI has to go.

A major advance toward solving the 60-year-old sunflower conjecture is shedding light on how order begins to appear as random systems grow in size.

Researchers have discovered a surprising mathematical relationship in the brain’s representations of sensory information, with possible applications to AI

Today Google announced that it achieved “quantum supremacy.” Its chief quantum computing rival, IBM, said it hasn’t. The disagreement hinges on what the term really means.

While we sleep, one kind of slow brain wave helps to reinforce memories, but a competing wave weakens them.

How do magnetars get so magnetic? A study of stellar explosions shows that the long-accepted theory might be wrong.

A close look at fundamental symmetries has exposed hidden patterns in the universe. Physicists think that those same symmetries may also reveal time’s original

Singing experiments with residents of the Bolivian rainforest demonstrate how biology and experience shape the way we hear music.

New work on the problem of “scissors congruence” explains when it’s possible to slice up one shape and reassemble it as another.

Most every cosmologist believes the universe is flat. A new analysis argues that it’s closed.