Archive

Scientists are pursuing materials that can conduct electricity with perfect efficiency under ambient conditions. In this episode, the physicist Siddharth Shanker Saxena tells co-host Janna Levin about what makes this hunt so difficult and consequential.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes.

Perhaps dark matter is made of an entirely different kind of particle than the ones physicists have been searching for. New experiments are springing up to look for these ultra-lightweight phantoms.

In 1940 André Weil wrote a letter to his sister, Simone, outlining his vision for translating between three distinct areas of mathematics. Eighty years later, it still animates many of the most exciting developments in the field.

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size.

After years of false starts, a team of computer scientists has found a way to efficiently deduce the Hamiltonian of a physical system at any constant temperature.

Four mathematicians broke a 75-year-old record by finding a denser way to pack high-dimensional spheres.

The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity.

The computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “meaning” into concrete, testable ideas.