Elise Cutts

An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist.

Modern thinking machines owe their existence to insights from the physics of complex materials.

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place.

Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials.

Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria.

Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade.

Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.

Altering a protein in the neurons that coordinate a rattlesnake’s movement made a slow slither neuron more like a speedy rattle neuron, showing one way evolution can generate new ways of moving.

For the first time, scientists have decoded the molecular structure of a protein that helps to sync a biological clock to the phases of the moon.