Archive

Reports that the James Webb Space Telescope killed the reigning cosmological model turn out to have been exaggerated. But astronomers still have much to learn from distant galaxies glimpsed by Webb.

Mathematicians have uncovered a surprising wealth of rock-paper-scissors-like patterns in randomly chosen dice.

Researchers can now find the shortest route through a network nearly as fast as theoretically possible, even when some steps can cancel out others.

Tiny genetic sequences in a mother’s bacteria seem to hop into the infant’s bacteria, perhaps ensuring a healthy microbiome later in life.

Mathematicians are taking ideas developed to study random numbers and applying them to a broad range of categories.

Nikta Fakhri is adapting and extending concepts from physics to describe how tiny biological components give rise to living organisms.

Queen ants live far longer than genetically identical workers. Researchers are learning what their longevity secrets could mean for aging in other species.

Random circuit sampling, a popular technique for showing the power of quantum computers, doesn’t scale up if errors go unchecked.

Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes ink to spread through water.