2020 in Review
Latest Articles
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders.
Comb jellies are helping answer fundamental questions in biology, from how the earliest nervous systems evolved to how bioluminescence works.
Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope’s ‘Little Red Dots.’
The James Webb Space Telescope spots mysterious “little red dots” everywhere. A bold new theory suggests they’re suns dozens of times larger than our entire solar system.
Why Do These Fossil Shells Flip Their Spirals Every Few Millennia?
The mystery of the flipping foraminifera may conceal a rarely observed evolutionary process playing out across the planet.
The Four-Color Theorem Gets a Rare New Proof
By revisiting the famous problem — which was controversially solved in the 1970s with the help of computers — mathematicians have gained important new insights into the nature of graphs.
What Is Math’s Mysterious Langlands Program Really About?
Hidden correspondences hint at a deeper structure to the mathematical universe. Our columnist unpacks one of those connections and asks mathematicians what they might mean.
AI Has Solved One of Math’s $1 Million Millennium Prize Problems
Mathematicians at OpenAI showed that the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe how fluids flow, can sometimes “blow up.” But the massive result is not without controversy.
Live from ICM 2026: What Is Math For in the Age of AI?
In this special live recording from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, July 2026, the central question discussed was what do mathematicians really value about doing mathematics in the first place?
In an Age of AI, a Physicist Seeks What Endures
Sarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees the potential for large language models to both help and harm her field.
Genome Duplication Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble
By doubling their entire genome, organisms can evolve extremely rapidly — or they can lose it all. New studies reveal how to survive the high-risk, high-reward evolutionary event.