A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a ...

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

Throughout nature, throngs of relatively simple elements can self-organize into behaviors that seem unexpectedly complex. Scientists are beginning to understand… ...

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia is now revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences. The year’s biggest computer science ...

Zoom out again, and you can no longer tell that the gas is made up of individual particles. It acts like one continuous substance. To model this macroscopic behavior — how dense the gas is and how ...

Quantum computers still can’t do much. Almost every time researchers have found something the high-tech machines should one day excel at, a classical algorithm comes along that can do it just as well ...

Physicists recently mapped the hidden shape that underlies the quantum behaviors of a crystal, using a new method that’s expected to become ubiquitous. Famously, at the quantum scale, particles can be ...

Manu Prakash’s many tools, top to bottom: a sheet of logic latches for a prototype of “thinking” materials; a glass and aluminum wheel for his new “gravity machine” microscope to map cells vertically ...

In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, a central problem in number theory that had remained open ...

The brain’s energy comes in the form of the molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which cells make from glucose and oxygen. A tremendous expanse of thin capillaries — an estimated 400 miles of ...

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder calculated in 1939 that if a perfectly spherical star gravitationally collapses to a point, its matter will become so dense that it will stretch space-time ...