explainers

As topologists seek to classify shapes, the effort hinges on how to define a manifold and what it means for two of them to be equivalent.

Genomes hold immense quantities of noncoding DNA. Some of it is essential for life, some seems useless, and some has its own agenda.

One of the strangest results in mathematics explains how it’s possible to turn one sphere into two identical copies, simply by rearranging its pieces.

Brown dwarfs such as “The Accident” are illuminating the murky borderlands that separate planets from stars.

By focusing on relationships between solutions to polynomial equations, rather than the exact solutions themselves, Évariste Galois changed the course of modern mathematics.

Theorists are in a frenzy over “fractons,” bizarre, but potentially useful, hypothetical particles that can only move in combination with one another.

The root of today’s quantum revolution was John Stewart Bell’s 1964 theorem showing that quantum mechanics really permits instantaneous connections between far-apart locations.

Other diseases with long-term symptoms can help us understand how COVID can affect us long after the virus itself is gone.

These ultrabright flashes have recently been tracked for days, upending ideas about the cataclysms that create them.