In Shang-Hua Teng’s work, theoretical and practical questions have long been intertwined. Now he’s turning his focus to the impractical.

In three-dimensional space, the surface of a black hole must be a sphere. But a new result shows that in higher dimensions, an infinite number of configurations are possible.

Whether you’re passing secret notes in class or downloading images from a space probe, Reed-Solomon codes offer an ingenious way to embed information and correct for errors.

Reports that the James Webb Space Telescope killed the reigning cosmological model turn out to have been exaggerated. But astronomers still have much to learn from distant galaxies glimpsed by Webb.

Mathematicians have uncovered a surprising wealth of rock-paper-scissors-like patterns in randomly chosen dice.

Researchers can now find the shortest route through a network nearly as fast as theoretically possible, even when some steps can cancel out others.

Tiny genetic sequences in a mother’s bacteria seem to hop into the infant's bacteria, perhaps ensuring a healthy microbiome later in life.

Mathematicians are taking ideas developed to study random numbers and applying them to a broad range of categories.

Nikta Fakhri is adapting and extending concepts from physics to describe how tiny biological components give rise to living organisms.