Explainers

The trailblazing work of the biochemist Carrie Partch has revealed crucial details about how clock proteins in our cells produce our daily circadian rhythm.

Cynthia Chiang describes the experiments she hopes will illuminate the early universe.

Andrew Granville muses on how artificial intelligence could profoundly change math.

David Richeson discusses the history and significance of the four color theorem.

Kalai discusses the meaning of cryptography and how essential it is to our daily lives.

Oppenheim describes why he thinks gravity can’t be squeezed into the same quantum box as the other fundamental forces — and what he’s proposing as an alternative.

Leonard Susskind and collaborators set out to understand why black hole interiors grow forever. They ended up proposing a new law of physics.

Renate Loll describes her theory of causal dynamical triangulations and how it might unlock certain aspects of quantum gravity.

DeepMind researchers trained an AI system called AlphaTensor to find new, faster algorithms for matrix multiplication. AlphaTensor quickly rediscovered — and surpassed, for some cases — the reigning algorithm discovered by German mathematician Volker Strassen in 1969.