Explainers

These ultrabright flashes have recently been tracked for days, upending ideas about the cataclysms that create them.

Animals sculpt the optical properties of their tissues at the nanoscale to give themselves “structural colors.” New work is piecing together how they do it.

Originally devised as a rigorous means of counting holes, homology provides a scaffolding for mathematical ideas, allowing for a new way to analyze the shapes within data.

An enigmatic connection between the forces of nature is allowing physicists to explore gravity’s quantum side.

The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.

Despite finding no specific examples, researchers have proved the existence of a pervasive kind of prime number so delicate that changing any of its infinite digits renders it composite.

The zoo of spontaneously emerging particlelike entities known as quasiparticles has grown quickly and become more and more exotic. Here are a few of the most curious and potentially useful examples.

A recent paper set the fastest record for multiplying two matrices. But it also marks the end of the line for a method researchers have relied on for decades to make improvements.

Researchers are tracking the different strains of SARS-CoV-2 and studying how they spread through our population and our bodies.