Archive

Mathematical magic can seem like mind reading. Your job is to reveal the secret behind these four tricks.

Throwing out data seems to make measurements of distances and angles more precise. The reason why has been traced to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

The famed Navier-Stokes equations can lead to cases where more than one result is possible, but only in an extremely narrow set of situations.

Robots are about to venture into the sunless depths of lunar craters to investigate ancient water ice trapped there, while remote studies find hints about how water arrives on rocky worlds.

While it’s understandable to focus on the diseases affecting humans, it’s important to study how our illnesses may affect animals.

Was the addition of mitochondria a first step in the formation of complex cells or one of the last? A new study of bacteria tries to answer this contentious question in evolutionary biology.

Two young mathematicians have astonished their colleagues with a full proof of the Kahn-Kalai conjecture — a sweeping statement about how structure emerges in random sets and graphs.

Van der Waerden’s conjecture mystified mathematicians for 85 years. Its solution shows how polynomial roots relate to one another.

The immune system protects us from a full spectrum of pathogens, but without balance, it can end up hurting us over time, too. The immunologist Shruti Naik explains how our defenses can turn on us.