Long known as a messenger within cells, RNA is increasingly seen as life’s molecular communication system — even between ...

Mathematicians have long wondered how “shapes of constant width” behave in higher dimensions. A surprisingly simple ...

Last year, an immense but brief outburst of seismic energy was soon followed by a long hum that made the world ring. Finding ...

At 11:30 one night in May 2024, a graduate student, Chuankun Zhang, saw a signal that physicists have sought for 50 years. As a peak rose from the static on his monitor at the research institute JILA ...

The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is ...

What do the integers have in common with the symmetries of a triangle? In the 19th century, mathematicians invented groups as an answer to this question. Mathematics started with numbers — clear, ...

The mathematician Daniel Litt has driven social media users to distraction with a series of simple-seeming but counterintuitive probability puzzles. In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent ...

Nearly a century ago, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called attention to a quirk of the quantum world that has fascinated and vexed researchers ever since. When quantum particles such as atoms ...

Matt Strassler is a theoretical particle physicist, blogger and writer whose research often takes him to the Large Hadron Collider. He is the author of Waves in an Impossible Sea, a popular book about ...