A straightforward conjecture about runners moving around a track turns out to be equivalent to many complex mathematical ...

The last decade has seen vast improvements in humanoid robots, but graduating to widespread use might require going back to the fundamentals. “Not reliably,” Hurst said. “I don’t think it’s totally ...

Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astrid Eichhorn, a leader in an area of study called asymptotic safety, thinks we just need to push a little further.

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new high-definition view reveals the machine in action.

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way.

Baez called for the development of new mathematics — he called it “green” math — to better capture the workings of Earth’s biosphere and climate. For his part, he sought to apply category theory, a ...

Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists must go to the ends of space and time to find a fix.

According to Einstein’s theory of gravity, black holes have only a small handful of distinguishing characteristics. Quantum theory implies they may have more. Now an experimental search finds that any ...

Promise and controversy continues to surround string theory as a potential unified theory of everything. In the latest episode of The Joy of Why, Cumrun Vafa discusses his progress in trying to find ...

A healthy brain maintains a harmony of neurons that excite or inhibit other neurons, but the lines between different types of cells are blurrier than researchers once thought. Climate science is the ...

When life first emerged roughly 4 billion years ago, DNA may have been a much more malleable molecule.