Three researchers have found a long-sought way to pull information from large databases secretly, moving us closer to fully private internet searches.

High-dimensional spheres can have a much wider variety of structures than mathematicians thought possible.

In the rumbles and groans of underwater volcanoes, Jackie Caplan-Auerbach finds her favorite harmonies — and clues to the Earth’s interior.

Neuroscientists recently discovered that small numbers have a different neural signature than larger ones, offering a new look into the brain’s number system and its connections to memory and mathematics.

Scientists have recently discovered scores of free-floating worlds that defy classification. The new observations have forced them to rethink their theories of star and planet formation.

Cells in the placenta have an unusual trick for activating gentle immune defenses and keeping them turned on when no infection is present. It involves crafting and deploying a fake virus.

By bringing together disparate approaches, machines can reach a new level of creative problem-solving.

Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians.

Three computer scientists have disproved a long-standing conjecture about a fundamental problem involving imperfect information.

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.

How Fermat’s less famous ‘little theorem’ got mathematicians young and old to play with prime-like Carmichael numbers.

For 50 years, physicists have understood current as a flow of charged particles. But a new experiment has found that in at least one strange material, this understanding falls apart.

Paradoxically, natural selection can sometimes seem to block organisms from evolving useful adaptations. But a new study of “fitness landscapes” and antibiotic resistance in bacteria shows that life still finds a way.

Modern scientists aren’t content with predicting how life evolves. They want to shape it.

Mathematicians prove a theorem that illuminates the geometry of universes with tiny amounts of mass.

Researchers prove that navigating certain systems of vectors is among the most complex computational problems.

A century ago, the Stern-Gerlach experiment established the truth of quantum mechanics. Now it’s being used to probe the clash of quantum theory and gravity.

A team of four prominent mathematicians, including two Fields medalists, proved a conjecture described as a “holy grail of additive combinatorics.”

Erin Calipari works to understand how drugs like opioids and cocaine alter learning circuits and neurochemistry in one of the country’s epicenters of substance use disorder and addiction.

Astronomers thought they had solved the mystery of gamma-ray bursts. A few recent events suggest otherwise.

The Markov numbers reveal the secrets of irrational numbers and the patterns of the Fibonacci sequence. But there’s one question about them that has resisted proof for over a century.