Q&A

The astrophysicist Erin Kara measures time lags in black holes’ X-ray glows, which reveal the complexity of the objects’ closest surroundings.

The links between math, music and art have been explored for thousands of years. Sarah Hart is now turning a mathematical eye to literature.

Throughout her 60-year career, Lenore Blum has developed new perspectives on logic and computation while championing women in mathematics and computer science. Now consciousness is on her mind.

Erin Calipari works to understand how drugs like opioids and cocaine alter learning circuits and neurochemistry in one of the country's epicenters of substance use disorder and addiction.

In the rumbles and groans of underwater volcanoes, Jackie Caplan-Auerbach finds her favorite harmonies — and clues to the Earth’s interior.

Alexei Efros has spent his career learning how machines see differently from humans. Now he’s helping to bridge the gap.

To catch even a whiff of the universe’s earliest epochs — an age of darkness, and one of new light — Cynthia Chiang builds her own equipment. Then she deploys it at the ends of the Earth.

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach.

Why did mammals, grasses and some other groups of organisms explode in diversity only after millions of years? The evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner plumbs the secrets of those “sleeping beauties.”