Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.
Daily bike rides, serendipitous interactions and long periods of solo thinking inspire this string cosmologist.
A California housewife who in the 1970s discovered four new types of tessellating pentagons is dead at 94.
A French mathematician has completed the classification of all convex pentagons, and therefore all convex polygons, that tile the plane.
Breathless media coverage notwithstanding, the cases for and against a hypothetical Planet Nine in the outskirts of the solar system remain inconclusive.
One of the world’s preeminent theoretical physicists seeks a quiet place to think.
Recent calculations tie together two conjectures about gravity, potentially revealing new truths about its elusive quantum nature.
The physicist who designed the LIGO experiment that detected gravitational waves still holes up in a small basement lab surrounded by electronics and optical instruments.
New math shows how, contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, conscious beings and other macroscopic entities might have greater influence over the future than do the sum of their microscopic components.