clear explanation of Apollonian circle packing and disproving the local-global conjecture # | Continue reading
Solve these puzzle questions to level up your Wordle game. | Continue reading
A team of physicists has entangled three photons over a considerable distance, which could lead to more powerful quantum cryptography. | Continue reading
A comprehensive mathematical framework treats wrinkling patterns as elegant solutions to geometric problems. | Continue reading
The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed. We’ve attempted to connect the proton’s many faces to form the most complete picture yet. | Continue reading
Harry Halpin wants our internet conversations to be more private. He’s helped create a new kind of network that might make it possible. | Continue reading
Recent explorations of unique geometric worlds reveal perplexing patterns, including the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio. | Continue reading
Letting human brain organoids grow in animal brains could be an ethical new option for experimental studies of neurological disorders. | Continue reading
In his senior year of high school, Daniel Larsen proved a key theorem about Carmichael numbers — strange entities that mimic the primes. “It would be a paper that any mathematician would be really proud to have written,” said one mathematician. | Continue reading
Efforts to build a better digital “nose” suggest that our perception of scents reflects both the structure of aromatic molecules and the metabolic processes that make them. | Continue reading
The decades-old Sullivan’s conjecture, about the best way to minimize the surface area of a bubble cluster, was thought to be out of reach for three bubbles and up — until a new breakthrough result. | Continue reading
Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 for their development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. | Continue reading
The quantum physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. | Continue reading
Svante Pääbo has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for studying our extinct ancestors’ DNA. | Continue reading
Readers rescued a Star Trek crew from a probabilistic predicament armed only with the power of mathematical reasoning. | Continue reading
Even though we’ve learned a lot about this relative of smallpox, some mysteries remain due to a lack of political will. | Continue reading
In 2020, researchers reported that they had created a room-temperature superconductor. That paper has now been retracted. | Continue reading
Of all the endless questions children and mathematicians have asked about infinity, one of the most fascinating has to do with its size. | Continue reading
A new atomic-scale experiment all but settles the origin of the strong form of superconductivity seen in cuprate crystals, confirming a 35-year-old theory. | Continue reading
The past and the future are tightly linked in conventional quantum mechanics. Perhaps too tightly. A tweak to the theory could let quantum possibilities increase as space expands. | Continue reading
A simple geometric idea has been used to power advances in information theory, cryptography and even blockchain technology. | Continue reading
Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving, has a vision for bringing “joyous, beautiful math” — and problem-solving — to classrooms everywhere. | Continue reading
Anima Anandkumar wants computer scientists to move beyond the matrix, among other challenges. | Continue reading
A statistical analysis of chemical tags on DNA may help unify disparate theories of aging. | Continue reading
In honor of the actor and activist Nichelle Nichols, this month’s puzzle imagines a Star Trek adventure in which her character, Lieutenant Uhura, faces a life-and-death conundrum. | Continue reading
Two mathematicians have proven Patterson’s conjecture, which was designed to explain a strange pattern in sums involving prime numbers. | Continue reading
Self-supervised learning allows a neural network to figure out for itself what matters. The process might be what makes our own brains so successful. | Continue reading
Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, but there’s reason to think it’s missing something. Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical physicist David Tong about this enigmatic theory. | Continue reading
Ever since Archimedes, mathematicians have been fascinated by equations that involve a difference between squares. Now two mathematicians have proven how often these equations have solutions, concluding a decades-old quest. | Continue reading
Two years ago, Yitang Zhang was virtually unknown. Now his surprise solution to a major problem in number theory has catapulted him to mathematical stardom. Where does he go from here? | Continue reading
The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum. | Continue reading
The biochemist Nick Lane thinks life first evolved in hydrothermal vents where precursors of metabolism appeared before genetic information. His ideas could lead us to think differently about aging and cancer. | Continue reading
The solutions to Einstein’s equations that describe a spinning black hole won’t blow up, even when poked or prodded. | Continue reading
Christopher Kanan is building algorithms that can continuously learn over time — the way we do. | Continue reading
In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information. | Continue reading
A hidden link has been found between two seemingly unrelated particle collision outcomes. It’s the latest example of a mysterious web of mathematical connections between disparate theories of physics. | Continue reading
Everybody gets older, but not everyone ages in the same way. In this episode, Steven Strogatz speaks with Judith Campisi and Dena Dubal, two biomedical researchers who study the aging process. | Continue reading
Readers balanced logical reasoning and mathematical insights to find phony coins with a double-pan balance scale. | Continue reading
Perineuronal nets, rigid structures that hold certain neurons in place, affect a surprising amount of brain activity, including some associated with chronic pain. | Continue reading
New research finds that chaos plays a bigger role in population dynamics than decades of ecological data seemed to suggest. | Continue reading
The Kakeya conjecture predicts how much room you need to point a line in every direction. In one number system after another — with one important exception — mathematicians have been proving it true. | Continue reading
In the days after the mega-telescope started delivering data, astronomers reported new discoveries about galaxies, stars, exoplanets and even Jupiter. | Continue reading
Structural studies of the robust material called sporopollenin reveal how it made plants hardy enough to reproduce on dry land. | Continue reading
Three computer scientists have solved the NLTS conjecture, proving that systems of entangled particles can remain difficult to analyze even away from extremes. | Continue reading
Surprisingly, 107 years after the introduction of general relativity, the meanings of basic concepts are still being worked out. | Continue reading
What makes a proof stronger than a guess? What does evidence look like in the realm of mathematical abstraction? Hear the mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood explain how probability helps to guide number theorists toward certainty. | Continue reading
Patterns that guide the development of feathers and other features can be set by mechanical forces in the embryo, not just by gradients of chemicals. | Continue reading