Archive

The evolution of a defensive gland in beetles shows how organs can arise from novel cells carving out new functional niches for their neighbors.

The unambiguous discovery of a Wigner crystal relied on a novel technique for probing the insides of complex materials.

When Steven Weinberg died last month, the world lost one of its most profound thinkers.

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale.

Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

A pair of researchers has shown that trying to classify groups of numbers called “torsion-free abelian groups” is as hard as it can possibly be.

Brown dwarfs such as “The Accident” are illuminating the murky borderlands that separate planets from stars.

By focusing on relationships between solutions to polynomial equations, rather than the exact solutions themselves, Évariste Galois changed the course of modern mathematics.

Showy male competitions over mating privileges have grabbed scientists’ attention more often, but new work hints that sexual selection is also widespread among females.