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.

Cryptography is the thread that connects Julius Caesar, World War II and quantum computing, and it now lies under nearly every part of modern life. In this week’s episode, computer scientist Boaz Barak and co-host Janna Levin discuss the past and future of…

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.

You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better to avoid them.

A new proof marks the first progress in decades on a problem about how order emerges from disorder.

Carbon dioxide’s powerful heat-trapping effect has been traced to a quirk of its quantum structure. The finding may explain climate change better than any computer model.

Long explored but infrequently embraced, base 3 computing may yet find a home in cybersecurity.