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 ...

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with critical stores of carbon at stake.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...