Archive

Which mattered first at the dawn of life: proteins or nucleic acids? Proteins may have had the edge if a theorized process let them grow long enough to become self-replicating catalysts.

And not destroy humanity in the process.

By reimagining the kinks and folds of origami as atoms in a lattice, researchers are uncovering strange behavior hiding in simple structures.

The core of a neutron star is such an extreme environment that physicists can’t agree on what happens inside. But a new space-based experiment — and a few more colliding neutron stars — should reveal whether neutrons themselves break down.

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.