Complexity

Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials.

How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make the complex cosmos understandable? In this episode, the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and co-host Steven Strogatz explore the deep foundations of the scientific process.

The puzzle of emergence asks how regularities emerge on macro scales out of uncountable constituent parts. A new framework has researchers hopeful that a solution is near.

For the first time, mathematicians have proved that planetary orbits in a solar system will always be unstable.

If we want to understand complex constructions, such as ourselves, assembly theory says we must account for the entire history of how such entities came to be.

Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann have been honored for their work that led to reliable predictions of the effects of climate change. They will share the Nobel with Giorgio Parisi, who has made pioneering studies of chaotic physical systems.

While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent priority, biologists also learned more about how brains process information, how to define individuality and why sleep deprivation kills.

To tame urban traffic, the computer scientist Carlos Gershenson finds that letting transportation systems adapt and self-organize often works better than trying to predict and control them.

Skyrocketing animal diversity a half-billion years ago was linked to spikes and dips in marine oxygen levels, according to a detailed geological study.