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Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

April 2, 2025

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.

The High Cost of Quantum Randomness Is Dropping

March 28, 2025

Randomness is essential to some research, but it’s always been prohibitively complicated. Now, we can use “pseudorandomness” instead.

Is Dark Energy Getting Weaker? New Evidence Strengthens the Case.

March 19, 2025

Last year, an enormous map of the cosmos hinted that the engine driving cosmic expansion might be sputtering. Now physicists are back with an even bigger map, and a stronger conclusion.

New Conversations, Deep Questions, Bold Ideas in Season Four of ‘The Joy of Why’

March 13, 2025

Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions of our time, with 12 all-new episodes and a new format.

The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’

March 12, 2025

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place.

‘Next-Level’ Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability

March 7, 2025

In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle.

Q&A

The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI

February 28, 2025

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.

New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes

February 24, 2025

Physicists hope that understanding the churning region near singularities might help them reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.

How Hans Bethe Stumbled Upon Perfect Quantum Theories

February 12, 2025

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences.

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