The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the ...

Some quantum cryptographers want to find ways to keep messages secret even if the rules of quantum mechanics don’t hold. The ...

Our tales of AI developing the will to survive, commandeer resources, and manipulate people say more about us than they do ...

Decades of weird experimental results appeared to support the existence of the sterile neutrino, a hypothetical particle that ...

Those changes will be contested, in math as in other academic disciplines wrestling with AI’s impact. As AI models become a ...

In theory, a universe can come in any shape or size, but scientists prefer to think about three basic kinds of universes: one that’s expanding, one that’s collapsing, and one that stays the same. Out ...

Around the world, volcanologists are following the path of magma as it travels between connected volcanoes, in an effort that could lead to improved eruption forecasts. In the summer of 1912, word ...

David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology. It’s natural to think of math as being fundamentally abstract. Whether it’s invented or discovered, its ...

Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world. Shor ...

Last summer, a wedding photographer walked begrudgingly into a physics laboratory outside Rome. Feeling uninspired by the intricate machinery around him, he decided to turn off the lights. “I wanted ...

In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although ...