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Celebrating the Playful Magic of John Horton Conway
Have fun exploring a numerical puzzle, a geometric puzzle and a game of random patterns, all inspired by the playful genius of the legendary mathematician.
Room-Temperature Superconductivity Claim Falls Apart [Update]
In 2020, researchers reported that they had created a room-temperature superconductor. That paper has now been retracted.
A Physicist’s Approach to Biology Brings Ecological Insights
The physicist Jeff Gore tests theories about microbe communities experimentally and finds new rules governing ecological stability.
New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life
The ingredients for reactions ancestral to metabolism could have formed very easily in the primordial soup, new work suggests.
Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record
After 44 years, there’s finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem.
Nobel Chemistry Prize Awarded for CRISPR ‘Genetic Scissors’
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of CRISPR/Cas9 genetic editing.
Physics Nobel Awarded for Black Hole Breakthroughs
Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies of black holes.
Scientists Win Nobel Prize for Discovering the Hepatitis C Virus
Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the cause of a major liver disease.
Building the Mathematical Library of the Future
A small community of mathematicians is using a software program called Lean to build a new digital repository. They hope it represents the future of their field.