Physics

What does measuring distances in sailing and astrophysics have to with motion sickness?

A complete classification could lead to a wealth of new materials and technologies. But some exotic phases continue to resist understanding.

This holiday season, catch up on science and math news while solving our year-end crossword.

Two mathematicians prove that under certain extreme conditions, the Navier-Stokes equations output nonsense.

The mother of all string theories passes a litmus test that, so far, no other candidate theory of quantum gravity has been able to match.

Updated results from a Japanese neutrino experiment continue to reveal an inconsistency in the way that matter and antimatter behave.

A famously difficult mathematical problem resisted solution for over 40 years. Mathematicians have finally resolved it by following an intuition that links number theory to physics.

It weighs as much as 780 million suns and helped to cast off the cosmic Dark Ages. But now that astronomers have found the earliest known black hole, they wonder: How could this giant have grown so big, so fast?

Join a fleet of robotic probes on a one-way virtual-reality trip into the abyss of a massive black hole.