It’s surprisingly difficult to prove one of the most basic properties of a number: whether it can be written as a fraction. A ...

Nanotube bridge networks grow between the most abundant photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans, suggesting that the world is ...

Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the ...

Hypothetical devices that can quickly and accurately answer questions have become a powerful tool in computational complexity ...

The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the astrophysicist and author Janna Levin interview leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time.

The security system that underlies the internet makes use of a curious fact: You can broadcast part of your encryption to make your information much more secure.

Researchers got a better look at the thoughts of chatbots, amateurs learned exactly how complicated simple systems can be, and quantum computers passed an essential milestone. The end of 2024 seems a ...

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world ...

Physicists discovered strange supersolids, constructed new kinds of superconductors, and continued to make the case that the cosmos is far weirder than anyone suspected. Will 2024 be remembered as a ...

Synthetic biology experiments suggest a “MultiFate” model for how genetically identical cells become the many different types found in complex organisms like us. Life could use a more expansive ...