Archive

If you didn’t get a flu shot, you are endangering more than just your own health. Calculations of herd immunity against common diseases don’t make exceptions.

Newly discovered “standard sirens” provide an independent, clean way to measure how fast the universe is expanding.

To efficiently analyze a firehose of data, scientists first have to break big numbers into bits.

Physicists theorize that a new “traversable” kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.

Minor genetic changes can have big evolutionary consequences. When a gene duplication gave some water striders a novel leg part, it opened up a new world for them.

A new version of AlphaGo needed no human instruction to figure out how to clobber the best Go player in the world — itself.

Studies of the energy-harvesting proteins in primitive cells suggest that key features of photosynthesis might have evolved a billion years earlier than scientists thought.

Astronomers have for the first time matched a gravitational-wave signal to a kilonova’s burst of light, observations that will “go down in the history of astronomy.”

Simple math can help scheming politicians manipulate district maps and cruise to victory. But it can also help identify and fix the problem.