The collective electrical activity of many neurons can be seen as waves propagating through the brain from one region to the ...

The biggest breakthrough in modern theoretical physics is the discovery that gravity can collapse the dimensions of space.

Half of our genome is made of transposons — snips of DNA that can move and copy themselves. But they’re more than parasites ...

Scientists have a history of trying — and failing — to link biology and quantum mechanics. The real connection between them may be in the math.

In 2004, two mathematicians hypothesized a powerful kind of sandwich. They were studying graphs, which are collections of points (called vertices) and lines (called edges). Graphs might represent ...

Hidden correspondences hint at a deeper structure to the mathematical universe. Our columnist unpacks one of those connections and asks mathematicians what they might mean. The mathematical universe ...

No larger than the head of a match, Potamopyrgus antipodarum doesn’t look very impressive. Few people visiting New Zealand’s Lake Alexandrina even notice the tiny gastropods littering the shores. The ...

Mathematicians at OpenAI showed that the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe how fluids flow, can sometimes “blow up.” But the massive result is not without controversy. On the morning of Tuesday, ...

Sarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees the potential for large language models to both help and harm her field. In July 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy selected 278 ...

Some math problems continue to haunt researchers long after they’ve been solved. A proof emerges, is even celebrated, and yet dissatisfaction lingers. Perhaps the argument is too convoluted — the hunt ...

For thousands and sometimes millions of years, marine plankton all over the world built their spiral shells in one direction. Then, suddenly, the spirals switched direction at the same time, ...