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 ...

Dozens of new discoveries reveal that defenses evolved by bacteria and viruses billions of years ago still define our own ...

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

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 ...

There’s a moment, just before the tight mass of cells that is a developing mouse embryo implants itself in the womb, that it all comes apart. Hundreds of tiny fluid-filled bubbles expand between each ...

In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs ...

On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, six closely watched bats took to the star-draped skies. As they flew across the seven-acre speck of land, devices implanted in their brains pinged data back to ...

Imagine if our skies were always filled with a thick layer of opaque clouds. With no way to see the stars, or to view our planet from above, would we have ever discovered that the Earth is round? The ...

The uniquely vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 5 meters. But when that will happen — and how fast — is anything but settled. However, not all ...

New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is. Some 4 billion ...