Archive

A surprisingly youthful estimate of the age of the rings has stirred a backlash.

Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can’t be overcome with good design alone.

Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists toward a misstep in Stephen Hawking’s legendary black hole analysis.

After millions of games, machine learning algorithms found creative solutions and unexpected new strategies that could transfer to the real world.

Taste and smell receptors in unexpected organs monitor the state of the body’s natural microbial health and raise an alarm over invading parasites.

Three physicists stumbled across an unexpected relationship between some of the most ubiquitous objects in math.

Mathematicians have figured out exactly how many moves it takes to randomize a 15 puzzle.

How a young celebrity became one of the first female astronomers at Caltech, befriended Richard Feynman, and ended up the world’s foremost chronicler of the science of the night sky.

Activity in the visual cortex and other sensory areas is dominated by signals about body movements, down to little tics and twitches. Scientists are now rethinking how they study and conceive of perception.