Features

Astronomers are scouring the cosmos for fingerprints of the invisible — tiny clumps of pure dark matter that might solve a long-standing cosmic mystery.

A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an audience. It crowned no winners — but it can still claim progress.

How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.

Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But recent James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts.

Inside of a black hole, the two theoretical pillars of 20th-century physics appear to clash. Now a group of young physicists think they have resolved the conflict by appealing to the central pillar of the new century — the physics of quantum information.

Extreme microorganisms carpeting the Atacama Desert in Chile illuminate how life might have first taken hold on Earth’s surface.

A series of new papers describes how to fully characterize key dynamical systems with relatively little data.

With embryolike constructs built entirely from stem cells, researchers can revolutionize our understanding of development. But how close to an embryo is too close?

The puzzling behavior of black hole interiors has led researchers to propose a new physical law: the second law of quantum complexity.