Archive

“Ribbon concordance” will let mathematicians compare knots by linking them across four-dimensional space.

Leslie Lamport revolutionized how computers talk to each other. Now he’s working on how engineers talk to their machines.

By resolving a paradox about light in a box, researchers hope to clarify the concept of energy in quantum theory.

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope released a historic image of a supermassive black hole in another galaxy. The follow-up — an image of Sagittarius A* — shows it shimmering at the center of our own.

Finding out whether a question is too difficult to ever solve efficiently depends on figuring out just how hard it is. Researchers have now shown how to do that for a major class of problems.

Researchers say we’re on the cusp of “GoPro physics,” where a camera can point at an event and an algorithm can identify the underlying physics equation.

Several projects are aiming to bring back mammoths and other species that have vanished from the planet. Whether that’s technically possible is beside the point.

When researchers gave a genetic molecule the ability to replicate, it evolved over time into a complex network of “hosts” and “parasites” that both competed and cooperated to survive.

Einstein’s description of curved space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the quest for quantum gravity with host Steven Strogatz.