Abstractions blog

Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists toward a misstep in Stephen Hawking’s legendary black hole analysis.

Mathematicians have figured out exactly how many moves it takes to randomize a 15 puzzle.

Most every cosmologist believes the universe is flat. A new analysis argues that it’s closed.

Singing experiments with residents of the Bolivian rainforest demonstrate how biology and experience shape the way we hear music.

How do magnetars get so magnetic? A study of stellar explosions shows that the long-accepted theory might be wrong.

Today Google announced that it achieved “quantum supremacy.” Its chief quantum computing rival, IBM, said it hasn’t. The disagreement hinges on what the term really means.

A major advance toward solving the 60-year-old sunflower conjecture is shedding light on how order begins to appear as random systems grow in size.

The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and shape theories of cosmology.

John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing lithium-ion batteries, “the hidden workhorses of the mobile era.”