Mathematicians have long wondered how “shapes of constant width” behave in higher dimensions. A surprisingly simple ...

Long known as a messenger within cells, RNA is increasingly seen as life’s molecular communication system — even between ...

Last year, an immense but brief outburst of seismic energy was soon followed by a long hum that made the world ring. Finding ...

Cell membranes from comb jellies reveal a new kind of adaptation to the deep sea: curvy lipids that conform to an ideal shape under pressure. ‘Groups’ Underpin Modern Math. Here’s How They Work. What ...

The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is ...

What do the integers have in common with the symmetries of a triangle? In the 19th century, mathematicians invented groups as an answer to this question. Mathematics started with numbers — clear, ...

At 11:30 one night in May 2024, a graduate student, Chuankun Zhang, saw a signal that physicists have sought for 50 years. As a peak rose from the static on his monitor at the research institute JILA ...

Matt Strassler is a theoretical particle physicist, blogger and writer whose research often takes him to the Large Hadron Collider. He is the author of Waves in an Impossible Sea, a popular book about ...

The mathematician Daniel Litt has driven social media users to distraction with a series of simple-seeming but counterintuitive probability puzzles. In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent ...