Features

A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. But it's also revealed how far AI has to go.

Studies suggest that epigenetics allows some learned adaptive responses to be passed down to new generations. The question is how.

Two monumental works have led many mathematicians to avoid the equal sign. The process has not always gone smoothly.

In the “underground economy” for soil nutrients, fungi strike hard bargains and punish plants that won’t meet their price.

New measurements could upend the standard theory of the cosmos that has reigned since the discovery of dark energy 21 years ago.

Three experiments have vetted quantum Darwinism, a theory that explains how quantum possibilities can give rise to objective, classical reality.

Lurking behind Einstein’s theory of gravity and our modern understanding of particle physics is the deceptively simple idea of symmetry. But physicists are beginning to question whether focusing on symmetry is still as productive as it once was.

Researchers struggle to incorporate ongoing evolutionary discoveries into an animal classification scheme older than Darwin.

A recent challenge to Stephen Hawking’s biggest idea — about how the universe might have come from nothing — has cosmologists choosing sides.