A decade ago, Karen Lloyd discovered single-celled microbes living beneath the seafloor. Now she studies how they can survive ...

For decades, mathematicians have struggled to understand matrices that reflect both order and randomness, like those that ...

The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even ...

The effects of insufficient water are felt by every cell in the body, but it’s the brain that manifests our experience of ...

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the ...

Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size entities anchored to the core-mantle boundary might be involved.

An attack on a fundamental proof technique reveals a glaring security issue for blockchains and other digital encryption schemes.

Mathematician Maggie Miller explores the strange and fascinating world of 4D topology — the study of shapes, or manifolds, that resemble flat Euclidean space when viewed up close.

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.” ...

Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists must go to the ends of space and time to find a fix.

The physicist Sidney Nagel delights in solving mysteries of the universe that are hiding in plain sight.