Abstractions blog

Astronomers have known where the universe’s missing matter has been hiding for the past 20 years. So why did it take so long to find it?

In math, sometimes the most common things are the hardest to find.

Cosmologists have predicted the existence of an oscillating signal that could distinguish between cosmic inflation and alternative theories of the universe’s birth.

The 19th-century discovery of numbers called “quaternions” gave mathematicians a way to describe rotations in space, forever changing physics and math.

String theorists elide a paradox about black holes by extinguishing the walls of fire feared to surround them.

Evolution may have coopted an ancient metabolic mechanism to set social insects on the path toward one of the most puzzling behaviors found in nature.

Researchers explore a loophole that extracts useful energy from a fluid’s seemingly random motion. The secret? Sugar and asymmetry.

In the hunt for new fundamental particles, physicists have always had to make assumptions about how the particles will behave. New machine learning algorithms don’t.

Some species have the equivalent of many more than two sexes, but most do not. A new model suggests the reason depends on how often they mate.