Should Covid-19 vaccines be judged by how well they prevent disease or how well they prevent death? Anna Durbin, a public health expert and vaccine researcher, talks with Steven Strogatz about the science behind vaccines.

The surprisingly simple tile is the first single, connected tile that can fill the entire plane in a pattern that never repeats — and can’t be made to fill it in a repeating way.

Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems.

A novel type of “jumping gene” may explain why the genomes of complex cells aren’t all equally stuffed with noncoding sequences.

The four-color problem is simple to explain, but its complex proof continues to be both celebrated and despised.

There once was a cosmic seed that sprouted the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have discovered its last surviving remnants.

The prize-winning geometer feels most fulfilled when exploring the fertile ground where constraint meets creation.

Learn why the quadratic formula works and why quadratics are easier to solve than cubics.

Last fall, a team of physicists announced that they had teleported a qubit through a holographic wormhole in a quantum computer. Now another group suggests that’s not quite what happened.