Natalie Wolchover

A complete classification could lead to a wealth of new materials and technologies. But some exotic phases continue to resist understanding.

The mother of all string theories passes a litmus test that, so far, no other candidate theory of quantum gravity has been able to match.

Join a fleet of robotic probes on a one-way virtual-reality trip into the abyss of a massive black hole.

Edward Witten reflects on the meaning of dualities in physics and math, emergent space-time, and the pursuit of a complete description of nature.

New data tracking the movements of millions of Milky Way stars have effectively ruled out the presence of a “dark disk” that could have offered important clues to the mystery of dark matter.

Astronomers are mystified by a strange star explosion in a distant galaxy that might be a relic from an earlier cosmological era.

The Zoomable Universe, a new book by the astrobiologist Caleb Scharf, the illustrator Ron Miller and 5W Infographics, tours the universe’s 62 orders of magnitude.

Newly discovered “standard sirens” provide an independent, clean way to measure how fast the universe is expanding.

Physicists theorize that a new “traversable” kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.