Archive

The astrophysicist Janna Levin describes the fierce scientific beauty she finds in black holes and reveals why she took a major risk early in her career.

As the founding director of a new institute for fundamental research in Rwanda, the physicist Omololu Akin-Ojo hopes to stem the brain drain of Africa’s brightest minds.

The recent discovery of some of the first galaxies in the universe illuminates the darkest era in cosmic history.

A proposal for building wormhole-connected black holes offers a way to probe the paradoxes of quantum information.

A problem confronts cosmology: Two independent measurements of the universe’s expansion give incompatible answers. Now a third method, advanced by an astronomy pioneer, appears to bridge the divide.

John Urschel, who retired from playing professional football with the Baltimore Ravens to become a mathematician, talks to host Steven Strogatz about the fascinations of graph theory that lured him away from the NFL.

Zoonotic diseases like influenza and many coronaviruses start out in animals, but their biological machinery often enables them to jump to humans.

Faced with a decision, the brain weighs its options by bundling them into rapidly alternating cycles of brain waves.

A recent neutron star merger has defied astronomers’ expectations, leading them to question longstanding ideas about neutron stars and the supernovas that create them. “We have to go back to the drawing board.”