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.

Tensors are used all over math and science to reveal hidden geometric truths. What are they?

A long-awaited study of the cosmic expansion rate suggests that when it comes to the Hubble tension, cosmologists are still missing something.

Today’s AI largely lives in computers, but acting and reacting in the real world — that’s the realm of robots. In this week’s episode, co-host Steven Strogatz talks with pioneering roboticist Daniela Rus about creativity, collaboration, and the unusual forms…

Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer searches museum jars for genetic traces of flu, measles and other viruses. Their evolutionary stories can help treat modern outbreaks and prepare for future ones.

The largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos hints that the dark energy that’s fueling the universe’s expansion may be weakening. One community of theoretical physicists expected as much.

For decades, extremal black holes were considered mathematically impossible. A new proof reveals otherwise.

Proteins are often visualized as cascades of curled ribbons and twisted strings, which both reveal and conceal the mess of atoms that make up these impossibly complex molecules.