The same pulling force that causes “tears” in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It’s another example of how genes exploit ...

The amplituhedron, a shape at the heart of particle physics, appears to be deeply connected to the mathematics of paper ...

Researchers have developed an AI system that learns about the world via videos and demonstrates a notion of “surprise” when ...

A healthy brain maintains a harmony of neurons that excite or inhibit other neurons, but the lines between different types of ...

Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect ...

Anna Demming is a freelance science writer and editor based in Bristol, United Kingdom. She has a doctorate in physics from King’s College London, where her research focused on ...

Nearly 170 years ago, a scientist named Eunice Foote discovered a fundamental truth about the gases that surround us. In her home laboratory in New York, she filled one glass cylinder with carbon ...

In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out to investigate the potential future of a planet on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. He started by looking some 600 ...

The Earth’s atmosphere is nothing but freely roaming molecules. Left alone, they would drift and collide, and eventually even out into a mixture that’s dynamic, yet stable and broadly unchanging. The ...

In 1876, Peter Guthrie Tait set out to measure what he called the “beknottedness” of knots. The Scottish mathematician, whose research laid the foundation for modern knot theory, was trying to find a ...