Archive

We asked four physicists why gravity stands out among the forces of nature. We got four different answers.

The nervous systems of foraging and predatory animals may prompt them to move along a special kind of random path called a Lévy walk to find food efficiently when no clues are available.

After a burst lit up their telescope “like a Christmas tree,” astronomers were able to finally track down the source of these cosmic oddities.

Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics.

To explain why men are on average taller than women, scientists theorized about competition for mates. But the effects of estrogen on bone growth may be answer enough.

Going without sleep for too long kills animals but scientists haven’t known why. Newly published work suggests that the answer lies in an unexpected part of the body.

Neural networks have been taught to quickly read the surfaces of proteins — molecules critical to many biological processes.

To distinguish between fundamentally different objects, mathematicians turn to invariants that encode the objects’ essential features.

Mathematicians try to figure out when problems can be solved using current knowledge — and when they have to chart a new path instead.