After a space telescope disintegrated, astrophysicists had little hope of understanding how supermassive black holes agitate giant galaxies. Then they invented a hack.
Mathematicians regard the Collatz conjecture as a quagmire and warn each other to stay away. But now Terence Tao has made more progress than anyone in decades.
Machine learning and deep neural networks can capture and analyze the “language” of animal behavior in ways that go beyond what’s humanly possible.
By considering simple symmetries, physicists working on the “bootstrap” can rediscover the basic form of the known forces that shape the universe.
Many of us are drawn to beauty in mathematics. But is that the way nature really works?
New studies help to explain how microbes in the gut can shape a host’s fear responses.
Smallpox was eradicated relatively quickly, but other diseases have proved harder to eliminate. The reasons are a mix of biology and psychology.
For the first time, physicists have calculated exactly what kind of singularity lies at the center of a realistic black hole.
Physicists have long searched for hypothesized dark matter particles called WIMPs. Now, focus may be shifting to the axion — an ultra-lightweight particle whose existence would solve two mysteries at once.