Archive

Researchers prove that navigating certain systems of vectors is among the most complex computational problems.

Mathematicians prove a theorem that illuminates the geometry of universes with tiny amounts of mass.

Modern scientists aren’t content with predicting how life evolves. They want to shape it.

Paradoxically, natural selection can sometimes seem to block organisms from evolving useful adaptations. But a new study of “fitness landscapes” and antibiotic resistance in bacteria shows that life still finds a way.

For 50 years, physicists have understood current as a flow of charged particles. But a new experiment has found that in at least one strange material, this understanding falls apart.

How Fermat’s less famous "little theorem" got mathematicians young and old to play with prime-like Carmichael numbers.

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.

Three computer scientists have disproved a long-standing conjecture about a fundamental problem involving imperfect information.

Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians.