Features

Enter the world of perfect numbers and explore the mystery mathematicians have spent thousands of years trying to solve.

Spurred on by quantum experiments that scramble the ordering of causes and their effects, some physicists are figuring out how to abandon causality altogether.

In the fight against COVID-19, disease modelers have struggled against misunderstanding and misuse of their work. They have also come to realize how unready the state of modeling was for this pandemic.

Inside cells, droplets of biomolecules called condensates merge, divide and dissolve. Their dance may regulate vital processes.

Lauren Williams has charted an adventurous mathematical career out of the pieces of a fundamental object called the positive Grassmannian.

It has been thought of as many things: a pointlike object, an excitation of a field, a speck of pure math that has cut into reality. But never has physicists’ conception of a particle changed more than it is changing now.

In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information.

Deep neural networks, often criticized as “black boxes,” are helping neuroscientists understand the organization of living brains.

The physicist Jeff Gore tests theories about microbe communities experimentally and finds new rules governing ecological stability.