Archive

By swapping ancient genes into modern E. coli, scientists hope to tease out the rules of evolution.

The soil teems with billions of hidden microbes. Researchers have begun to catalog how these organisms are changing the world.

Solve this variation of Thomas Kirkman’s famous 1850 puzzle by arranging girls in walking groups. And think fast — the clock is ticking.

A 150-year-old conundrum about how to group people has been solved, but many puzzles remain.

Quantum theorist Christopher Fuchs explains how to solve the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. His price: physics gets personal.

Modern birds emerged in a snap of evolutionary time through a series of simple genetic changes.

Three physicists have proposed a new solution to one of the deepest mysteries in particle physics: why the Higgs boson has such a tiny mass.

In the few decades since viruses were first found in the oceans, scientists have only been able to identify a handful of species. A new survey has uncovered nearly all the rest.

The Fields medalist Vladimir Voevodsky has died at 51. This 2015 article describes his computer-aided quest to eliminate human error and rewrite the century-old rules underlying all of mathematics.