Archive

A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an audience. It crowned no winners — but it can still claim progress.

Researchers have discovered ways around a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and beauty in digital images.

The telescope conjecture gave mathematicians a handle on ways to map one sphere to another. Now that it has been disproved, the universe of shapes has exploded.

In their jiggles and shakes, red giant stars encode a record of the magnetic fields near their cores.

How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.

For a half century, mathematicians have tried to define the exact circumstances under which a black hole is destined to exist. A new proof shows how a cube can help answer the question.

Why did mammals, grasses and some other groups of organisms explode in diversity only after millions of years? The evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner plumbs the secrets of those “sleeping beauties.”

Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But recent James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts.

New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.