At 25, Kurt Gödel proved there can never be a mathematical “theory of everything.” Columnist Natalie Wolchover explores the ...

Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter ...

The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy ...

Those scientists saved countless lives, but their forecast was more of an educated guess than it might have appeared. It was ...

A graduate student recently harnessed the complexity of mathematical proofs to create a powerful new tool in cryptography.

The planet is getting hotter, but one factor in particular makes it hard to tell just how hot it will get. Physicists and computer scientists are racing to solve the problem of clouds. While some fret ...

One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science. How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory When pigeons ...

Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond. His two theorems destroyed the search ...

In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism. Intuition ...

It should be possible, but getting there will require a greater understanding of subsurface physics. What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting. Armed with a slew of new ...

The sunlight-collecting organelles known as chloroplasts solve a packing problem: how to optimize photosynthesis without sustaining damage from dangerously intense rays. Living on light is a dangerous ...

Imagine if our skies were always filled with a thick layer of opaque clouds. With no way to see the stars, or to view our planet from above, would we have ever discovered that the Earth is round? The ...