Mirror Molecules: The Symmetry Rule Life Never Breaks

Most organic molecules have a mirror-image twin. This concept is known as chirality. Yet life only uses one chiral molecule, not the other. The reason for this asymmetry is one of the greatest mysteries of biology.

Mathematician Maggie Miller explores the strange and fascinating world of 4D topology — the study of shapes, or manifolds, that resemble flat Euclidean space when viewed up close.

A team of amateurs recently came together in an online collaboration called the Busy Beaver Challenge to pin down the value of BB(5), the fifth “busy beaver” number — a notoriously difficult problem in theoretical computer science.

Physicist Mario Krenn uses artificial intelligence to inspire and accelerate scientific progress.

After 30 years of effort, mathematicians finally proved a major component of the ambitious Langlands program.

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia is now revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.

The year’s biggest computer science stories included a new understanding of large language models, and a breakthrough in being able to compute complex quantum systems.

We look back at three of the biggest biology stories of 2024: a reconstruction of the ancient ancestor of all modern life, the discovery of a neural circuit that regulates the immune system, and artificial intelligence’s transformation of protein science.

A look back at three of the biggest stories in physics this year, including evidence that dark energy may be weakening, the discovery of a supersolid, and new advances in quantum geometry.