2020 in Review
Latest Articles
How Virus-like ‘Jumping Genes’ Became Our Partners in Evolution
Half of our genome is made of transposons — snips of DNA that can move and copy themselves. But they’re more than parasites or genetic junk.
Mathematicians Build Long-Awaited Graph Sandwich
The proof of a decades-old conjecture has given researchers a new way to understand complex networks.
Where Does the Quantum World End and Ours Begin?
Jonathan Halliwell explains how quantum decoherence is key to understanding how we transition from a world with a wave-like nature of matter and energy to the classical macroscopic world that we’re used to.
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.