Abstractions blog

Brown dwarfs such as “The Accident” are illuminating the murky borderlands that separate planets from stars.

By focusing on relationships between solutions to polynomial equations, rather than the exact solutions themselves, Évariste Galois changed the course of modern mathematics.

Mathematicians using the computer program Lean have verified the accuracy of a difficult theorem at the cutting edge of research mathematics.

Theorists are in a frenzy over “fractons,” bizarre, but potentially useful, hypothetical particles that can only move in combination with one another.

Scientists have reported large DNA structures in some archaea that defy easy categorization.

The root of today’s quantum revolution was John Stewart Bell’s 1964 theorem showing that quantum mechanics really permits instantaneous connections between far-apart locations.

The DNA of some viruses doesn’t use the same four nucleotide bases found in all other life. New work shows how this exception is possible and hints that it could be more common than we think.

A temporal pattern of activity observed in human brains may explain how we can learn so quickly.

These ultrabright flashes have recently been tracked for days, upending ideas about the cataclysms that create them.