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

athematics is, at its core, an art. Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create and explore new worlds. They ...

Physicists spotted a “terribly exciting” new black hole, doubled down on weakening dark energy, and debated the meaning of ...

Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system. A cloak of carbon dioxide suffocates the planet, subjecting its surface to skull-crushing pressure. Sulfuric acid rains down through the sickly ...

Neural networks power today’s AI boom. To understand them, all we need is a map, a cat and a few thousand dimensions. Look at a picture of a cat, and you’ll instantly recognize it as a cat. But try to ...

In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program. A group of nine mathematicians has proved the ...

In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate ...

So-called “higher symmetries” are illuminating everything from particle decays to the behavior of complex quantum systems. For that reason, research across physics is now building to a crescendo. It ...

At 11:30 one night in May 2024, a graduate student, Chuankun Zhang, saw a signal that physicists have sought for 50 years. As a peak rose from the static on his monitor at the research institute JILA ...

A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects. The hope was that the soil ...

Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, ...

For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise. In October 2018, David Asperó was on holiday in Italy, gazing out a car ...