Archive

In the 1960s, drillers noticed that certain fluids would firm up if they flowed too fast. Researchers have finally explained why.

Decades ago, a mathematician posed a warmup problem for some of the most difficult questions about prime numbers. It turned out to be just as difficult to solve, until now.

Mathematicians and computer scientists answered major questions in topology, set theory and even physics, even as computers continued to grow more capable.

Puzzling particles, quirky (and controversial) quantum computers, and one of the most ambitious science experiments in history marked the year’s milestones.

The detailed understanding of brains and multicellular bodies reached new heights this year, while the genomes of the COVID-19 virus and various organisms yielded more surprises.

Scientists have never been able to adequately explain where lightning comes from. Now the first detailed observations of its emergence inside a cloud have exposed how electric fields grow strong enough to let bolts fly.

It’s simple enough for AI to seem to comprehend data, but devising a true test of a machine’s knowledge has proved difficult.

A new paper shows how to create longer disordered strings than mathematicians had thought possible, proving that a well-known recent conjecture is “spectacularly wrong.”

When scientists discover genes linked to dangerous illnesses in their samples, how should they convey that news to the study participants? The geneticist Cristen Willer had to tackle that challenge.