Archive

Astronomers argue that there’s an undiscovered giant planet far beyond the orbit of Neptune. A newly discovered rocky body has added evidence to the circumstantial case for it.

Judea Pearl, a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence, argues that AI has been stuck in a decades-long rut. His prescription for progress? Teach machines to understand the question why.

When a crystallographer treated prime numbers as a system of particles, the resulting diffraction pattern created a new view of existing conjectures in number theory.

Just as antibiotics have bred resistance in bacteria, vaccines can potentially lose their effectiveness over diseases they controlled. Researchers are working to head off the evolution of new threats.

Faced with a navigational challenge, neural networks spontaneously evolved units resembling the grid cells that help living animals find their way.

A roundup of some of the most important discoveries gleaned so far from the Gaia space observatory’s new map of the galaxy.

New modeling studies suggest that birds migrate to strike a favorable balance between their input and output of energy.

Zeta values seem to connect distant geometric worlds. In a new proof, mathematicians finally explain why.

Disease-causing viruses and message-carrying vesicles sit at the ends of a spectrum of membranous particles that cells release.