Features

Our tales of AI developing the will to survive, commandeer resources, and manipulate people say more about us than they do about language models.

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with essential stores of carbon at stake.

The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one mathematicians can learn from as they push to formalize everything in the computer program Lean.

In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism.

Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has become impossible to ignore.

The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ripple across an ecosystem.

Over the past 60 years, scientists have largely succeeded in building a computer model of Earth to see what the future holds. One of the most ambitious projects humankind has ever undertaken has now reached a critical moment.

New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is.

Tipping points in our climate predictions are both wildly dramatic and wildly uncertain. Can mathematicians make them useful?