Archive

The Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska has solved the centuries-old sphere-packing problem in dimensions eight and 24.

The Go-playing program teaches itself to replicate something very much like human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences.

Scientists have created a synthetic organism that possesses only the genes it needs to survive. But they have no idea what roughly a third of those genes do.

For four game show variations of the hat puzzle, four clever ways to earn a better payoff than you might expect.

New insights from neuroscience — aided by a small zoo’s worth of dancing animals — are revealing the biological origins of rhythm.

The biologist David Deamer proposes that life evolved from a collection of interacting molecules, probably in a pool in the shadow of a volcano.

A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a long-standing assumption about how they behave.

A disarmingly simple model of ecology does everything well — except predict how rapidly nature can change. Can it become more realistic while still avoiding all of biology’s messy complexities?

In three new variations of a famous logic puzzle, what are the best strategies for guessing the color of the hat on your head?