Archive

Quadratic reciprocity lurks around many corners in mathematics. By proving it, number theorists reimagined their whole field.

New research in social bats raises the intriguing possibility that evolution can reprogram the brain’s “place cells,” which are typically associated with location, to encode all kinds of environmental information.

The discovery earlier this year of the “hat” tile marked the culmination of hundreds of years of work into tiles and their symmetries.

New work attacks a long-standing barrier to understanding how prime numbers are distributed.

After identifying interlocking symmetries in mammalian cells, scientists can describe some tissues as liquid crystals — an observation that lays the groundwork for a fluid-dynamic theory of how tissues move.

Alexei Efros has spent his career learning how machines see differently from humans. Now he’s helping to bridge the gap.

A new analysis of ancient sediments fills a gap in the fossil record — revealing a massive dynasty of ancient eukaryotes, which may have reigned for 800 million years and shaped the history of life of Earth.

What makes a quantum computer more powerful than a classical computer? It’s a surprisingly subtle question that physicists are still grappling with, decades into the quantum age.

For decades, researchers have debated whether brain cells called astrocytes can signal like neurons. Researchers recently published the best evidence yet that some astrocytes are part of the electrical conversation.