Archive

Knowing a little about the local connections on flight maps and other networks can reveal a lot about a system’s global structure.

Quantum algorithms can find their way out of mazes exponentially faster than classical ones, at the cost of forgetting the path they took. A new result suggests that the trade-off may be inevitable.

A new result shows how much of the plane can be colored by points that are never exactly one unit apart.

By treating Earth as a topological insulator — a state of quantum matter — physicists found a powerful explanation for the movements of the planet’s air and seas.

In some deep subterranean aquifers, cells have a chemical trick for making oxygen that could sustain whole underground ecosystems.

A new algorithm brings together the advantages of randomness and deterministic processes to reliably construct large prime numbers.

Abnormal waves of electrical activity can cause a heart’s muscle cells to beat out of sync. In this episode, Flavio Fenton, an expert in cardiac dynamics, talks with Steve Strogatz about ways to treat heart arrhythmias without resorting to painful defibrillators.

Extreme microorganisms carpeting the Atacama Desert in Chile illuminate how life might have first taken hold on Earth’s surface.

A new proof marks major progress toward solving the Kakeya conjecture, a deceptively simple question that underpins a tower of conjectures.