European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.

How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make the complex cosmos understandable? In this episode, the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and co-host Steven Strogatz explore the deep foundations of the scientific…

Useful mathematical concepts, like the number line, can linger for millennia before they are rigorously defined.

Computational complexity theorists have discovered a surprising new way to understand what makes certain problems hard.

Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research and kindling deep questions about why we do science.

Two mathematicians have proved a long-standing conjecture that is a step on the way toward finding the worst shape for packing the plane.

Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a critical missing piece of the galactic puzzle.

After decades of uncertainty, a motley team of programmers has proved precisely how complicated simple computer programs can get.

If you cover a surface with tiles, repetitive patterns always emerge — or do they? In this week’s episode, mathematician Natalie Priebe Frank and co-host Janna Levin discuss how recent breakthroughs in tiling can unlock structural secrets in the natural world.

Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time.

Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently.

Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results point to a new fundamental particle.

The proof creates stricter limits on potential exceptions to the famous Riemann hypothesis.

At sea, biologists discovered microbial partners that together produce nitrogen, a nutrient essential for life. The pair are in the process of merging into a single organism.

Common sense has been viewed as one of the hardest challenges in AI. That said, ChatGPT4 has acquired what some believe is an impressive sense of humanity. How is this possible? Listen to this week’s “The Joy of Why” with co-host Steven Strogatz.

These metaphorical gardens have become central objects in modern mathematics.

In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program.

One of the quantum fields that fills the universe is special because its default value seems poised to eventually change, changing everything.

When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments.

By creating digital twin of your circulatory system, Amanda Randles wants to bring unprecedented precision to medical forecasts.

Experiments that test physics and philosophy “as a single whole” may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.