Archive

By studying how electric organs arose in different lineages of fish, scientists gain new insights into a long-standing question of evolutionary biology.

In honor of the actor and activist Nichelle Nichols, this month’s puzzle imagines a Star Trek adventure in which her character, Lieutenant Uhura, faces a life-and-death conundrum.

A statistical analysis of chemical tags on DNA may help unify disparate theories of aging.

In exploring a family of two-dimensional crystals, a husband-and-wife team is uncovering a potent variety of new electron behaviors.

Two mathematicians have proven Patterson’s conjecture, which was designed to explain a strange pattern in sums involving prime numbers.

Self-supervised learning allows a neural network to figure out for itself what matters. The process might be what makes our own brains so successful.

Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, but there’s reason to think it’s missing something. Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical physicist David Tong about this enigmatic theory.

Ever since Archimedes, mathematicians have been fascinated by equations that involve a difference between squares. Now two mathematicians have proven how often these equations have solutions, concluding a decades-old quest.

The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum.